Find Me Another Life
by NegativeSpaces
Summary: You're not dead, but you don't know who you are or where you are or why somebody's shot you through the head and you don't feel a thing. And years from now, you still won't know how wandering through this wasteland of a world, you managed to fall in love. Zombie AU. Brittana.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: This is a thing. I don't know what I'm doing with it, or how often it's going to be updated, or if it's going to have any such thing as a plot, but I wanted to write it. It's also lazy writing. But who cares... everybody likes zombies. Right?

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**Chapter 1**_  
_

_"Daddy?"_

_It's hot and the air shifts when you stare up at the white ceiling - your whole world tilts on a crippled axis when your head swivels from side to side. Something is holding down your feeble efforts at movement and it sticks to the heat of your skin, clammy and tight, with the rattle of angry chains when you move. Through the corners of your eyes you see a mass of people, all dressed in the same unfeeling shade of white, seething around the room. _

_ A rough hand on your face brings you back - his touch is like sandpaper and he frowns when you whimper and turn away. Sweat rolls into your eyes, and he gently brings a cloth to wipe away the sting. The regret in his gaze startles you._

_ "I'm so sorry, baby girl," he hushes and pushes back a strand of your soaked hair, "we really thought it would work. I never meant for this to happen to you."_

_ Meant for what? The burn on your skin overwhelms you until you can scarcely think, your thoughts fracturing and scattering on the wind of your dry breath. There is a deeper pain in the meat of your forearm, nestled between the bones, and it pulses to your shoulder until it seems the half of you is paralysed by the agony. _

_ "I'll stay here right until the end," he continues, clutching your limp hand and drawing patterns upon your palm, "just like I promised. I won't leave you alone."_

_ Your mouth opens but your throat utters no noise, forced to focus in on his words and fight through the delirium that has seized your mind and seeped into the very essence of you. _

_ "We thought this was it, you know? You would be the one. You were the perfect specimen, they said." At this he cracks a small smile, runs his finger down your pronounced cheekbone. "I can't argue with that. Always so beautiful, just like your mother."_

_ Where is she? You look around, glazed eyes rolling from side to side, but you catch no glimpse of blonde hair. He shakes his head sadly, the downturn of his lips pulling until his whole expression crumples. _

_ "I won't let her see you, sweetheart. It... it'll be too much. I'm requesting transfer after this. I just... I'm so sorry, Brittany. I should never have volunteered you."_

_ Something beeps and you're assaulted from all sides by people in white, prodding at you, their fingers hard as stone against your tender flesh. You moan and the sound is grating, spiralling from deep in your chest, until they all pull back warily and watch your father still his sobs. He gets up, hovering over you; the glow from the harsh lights above him gives him a halo, and you raise one arm to touch his hair before your body gives out halfway. It falls back to your chest with a dull thump, the weak hush of the restraints but a distant sound. _

_ His left hand cradles your face and he smiles, the sentiment full of bitter tears. "Close your eyes, darling. It won't hurt for a second." Your eyelids flutter shut at his command and the dark is comforting in your confusion. Your father would never lead you wrong._

_ Cold metal at your temple. A kiss brushed against your forehead. _

_ "I love you, Britt."_

_ A click and a bang, then nothing but echoing silence._

* * *

The constant wheeze of the ventilation system wakes you.

You frown, the tiny crease in your brows the only flicker of life upon your face, listening to determine the source of the noise. As your spread your awareness further and further, it all becomes overwritten by the screaming pain in your skull and the ache in your joints. It sweeps you under the process of rational thought for what could be days, laying in a cocoon of shivering agony, listening to the hiss of the cool air that flows through the vents. You're inside, you know that much. The slick surface underneath you is too perfect to be natural.

_You have to open your eyes, kid._

You coach yourself through the actions but always give out just before the success, when that first sliver of light blinds you and your head explodes into a plethora of needles. Someone hammers a spike into your temple and you resign yourself to trying again, and again, and again.

Until.

The first time you fully open your eyes it feels like fire, but you force your blurry gaze to fix itself upon the metal above your head, squinting through the grit and tears that accumulate. There are white bricks, sterile and blank, making up the walls of the room. When you tilt your neck a fraction to the right you see blue tiles, so dark they shine black, with drains sporadically placed every few feet. Everything else is too far, shifting in and out of focus, so you blink and turn your attention back to the sectioned ceiling above with trails of shiny metal shafts splitting off above you. You count them, add one half to the other, subtract the grey ones from the beige ones. You try multiplying but math has never bee your best subject - when you ponder that, if you divide them by three would you get an even number, you decide it's time to get up.

That's easier said than done. Doing anything more than twitching your fingers causes a gasp of pain to spill from your dry, paper lips. Moving your legs makes you wonder if you'll ever be flexible again. Still, you awkwardly twist your body until you can wedge your right arm between you and the surface - a table? - and use the strength in your bicep to push yourself into a sitting position. You breath through the ache (yoga really does come in handy) and bring your good arm up to rub the painful grit from your eyes. When cleared, you finally take a good look around.

And promptly wish you hadn't.

Something tells you that you were never really good with horror movies.

Still, you've seen enough CSI to know where you are. Your eyes roam over the metal shelves, each with a little tag hanging from it, and stainless steel tables with a showerhead hovering over each. The low lighting and the various x-rays scattered about upon the little black screens. All the different tools, some gleaming, others covered in red, lined up on a stand and ready for use. You swallow a bout of nausea and glance down, noting with a sense of mounting unease that you wear a light blue slip, tied at the back, with nothing underneath. Just like the sole other occupant of the room.

Well, maybe you shouldn't say occupant. Whoever you used to share this place with is long dead; the skin is grey and waxy and the mouth hangs open, the blue of his lips startling against the contrast of his teeth. From underneath his slip the presence of his abdomen is unavoidable, bloated and straining upwards - the rest of his flesh hosts the same affliction to a lesser degree. For the first time you notice the smell of rot circulating in the air. Your eyes track around the room and you wonder how many more bodies are trapped within those shelves.

Thirst drives out any other observation - your throat sticks and your lips are split to the tender quick, and you wince whenever you attempt to wet them. Upon the distant table your eye spots a bottle, half-empty and unscrewed, but filled none the less with water. This distance, however short, means walking.

It also means walking past that rotting corpse.

Perhaps it's the light, but you spy the alluring gleam so clearly that your whole body cries for it. So, ever so slowly, every so cautiously, you swing your legs over the side of the table and shuffle to the edge, dangling into the short space between you and the floor. Even now your joints cry protest - the burn in your arm has increased to a sear, leaving your elbow unusable. You flinch, fingers tugging the edge of the soiled bandage around the wound, feeling it peel from your skin in painful spurts as the crusted top is ripped from the flesh. It isn't a well-dressed injury, with only one or two winds separating it from the open air. As your death-pale arm is finally revealed, you suck in a sharp breath of air at the destruction that you see.

Your forearm is mangled. It's the only word you can summon that adequately describes the mess. A large, crescent shaped wound has sunk deep to the marrow, gouged out pieces and torn others asunder (you see the nubile-white of your bone through the ligaments and it looks far too similar to frozen whites of his eyes), tainting the surrounding flesh an angry, brutal red. Upon the underside is a similar indent; together they must have severed a tendon, for curling your hand inwards is near impossible without crying out. It looks like a... bite mark? Did an animal find you laying here? You curl your injured arm to your chest and push it to the back of your mind - you have something else you need to take care of first.

The first steps you take in days are stiff and supported. Muscles in your right arm strain as you force yourself to stay upright, hunched over the table with sweat that rolls down the length of your temples. Your knees tremble and your thighs burn and this just needs to _stop_, you need to wake up in your own bed in your own house with your own- family? Did you have a family?

Wracking your brain merely produces shapes. Flickers of a memory, little snatches of sound stolen from times past. No matter how hard you try you remember little other than hot summer days laid out upon the grasses or cold winters by the fire, the days merging together until they become but blurs.

Who are you?

You stumble blindly across the room, hand sweeping beakers and papers to the floor - glass shatters but your naked feet hardly feel the sting. The cool of the counter is comforting - it brings quiet to your feverish mind and your flesh that radiates heat like the suns outside this. Infection has undoubtedly set in, slowing your both your body and mind - if it were such the case, then why is your vision still so sharp?

When the first touch of water meets your lips, the groan it produces is low and satiated, gulping down until you cough and hack. Only when the empty bottle crumples in your weak fist do you cast it down and chance another look around the room, searching for the unknown answers to your plight.

Instead, you find a mirror.

A stranger gazes back at you. Limp blond hair, tinted red, hangs about her waxen pallor. The slanted blue of her eyes is dull and confused, hazed with hunger. Her shoulders stand out from her lanky frame; you go to touch and you can nearly count the individual ribs from under her slip. Something peeks out near her collarbone.

Her bony fingers hook the neck of her slip away, pulling back hesitantly to view the damage underneath. A scar- no, such a word would not do it justice. A great thick line separates her skin in clean strokes, held together by metal staples. The flesh surrounding the area is numb, raised and swollen, continuing down under her clothing. You watch her blanch and tear at her paper dress, tugging and grasping until it's pulled up above her head and thrown carelessly to the floor, palms smoothing now over the gruesome injuries exposed to her. Somebody has slit her open to play with her insides - two gashes, both neatly stapled shut, join together between her breasts to trail down until her navel. She runs her fingers down the roads of her suffering, each bump of metal so wrong against the natural resistance of her flesh. The swell of her lungs strain them, and it shifts like a riled serpent when she moves.

Her body is not your body - your hands touch these wounds with a certain sense of dream, tracing them and prodding at what was left behind. You remember nothing, not of animals or knives - certainly not of this pain. There is an oppressive weight in the back of your skull, whispering of chairs and bright lights, but you whimper and push it away. Too many things clamour for your attention. But first, clothing; your body shivers under the cold of the ventilation shafts. So many deceased must have worn something in another time.

The halls are silent as you walk. Here, as you push your way through the metal doors of the morgue, you are delivered into a place of chaos. Walls are smeared with bloody handprints, desperate and dying, the floor wet with puddles of crimson. Papers are scattered and bullet holes make abstract portraits along the sides. Every so often, the neat little indent is spattered with a halo of red where it had met its mark.

Whatever horrors lingered here have long since passed. There is nothing but the sound of the broken vents, split open under the belly whom leak their invisible blood into the complex, and the distorted echo of your slow footsteps. Doors, open and gaping to shadowed rooms, offer but a glimpse into the monstrosity you missed - their entryways are tainted by large smears of blood, bodies that have dragged themselves into the concealed dark to die.

You reach what must be the main lobby. The same disaster, no matter where you turn, has too claimed this room. You bend stiffly at the knees to pick up a fluttering sheet of paper, eyes scanning over the formal wording, placing it down again once no more information has been gained. It seems hopeless - the front doors have been chained shut to keep away whatever evil lurks outside (or perhaps to keep it in?) and the endless maze of this place makes your head spin. You lower yourself down on the nearest chair, naked and shaking, placing your head in your hands.

Your fingers spread over your temples, nails digging into the hot flesh underneath, and you frown when a wetness spreads over your fingertips. Cautiously you glide your hand over your skull, coming upon a patch of shaved hair - hidden under the rest, you brush the short, prickly hairs before reaching an abnormality. Pain flares so bright it blinds you, and you jerk away as if burned.

Your hand comes back red.

"No," you moan, the sound foreign and grating from your throat, "not more. Please not more." With difficulty you drag yourself over to the desk - every breath comes in short, panicked gasps, the once unpronounced ache of your skull now a throbbing rhythm that aligns all your pains together, fingers flailing to grasp the first reflective surface you can find. Somebody had dropped their music player and the metallic backing had fractured; multiple faces of you peer out as you turn yourself to the side and pull back your limp curtain of hair.

It's almost anti-climatic in a sense. After all the unbelievable horrors you've endured these past hours, you'd think that one more would be the piece that severed your dwindling sanity. Instead, you eye the neat, round hole in your temple with a certain detachment, the edges clean and almost free of blood.

A swift kill.

The machine falls to the ground with a clatter and the sound against the stillness startles you - your body flinches back until you curl into a weak ball underneath the desk, teeth chattering and eyes squeezed shut. No light filters in but that singular dull shaft from the entryway, spilling illumination over the disgusting wounds on your sternum, traveling down your body to fan out by your feet.

Occupied by your more immediate survival, you had failed to notice the tag attached to your largest toe. Frowning, you pick at the string until it falls away into your palm, bringing it close to your face to read the scrawled writing.

_Brittany S. Pierce. _

Is this yours? Your... your name? It sounds right. Familiar. Its mantle fits well around your shoulders.

_Date of Birth: 02/15/1994_

_ Time of Death: 06/24/2012_

Death? No. No, they're wrong. You're not dead. You can't be. Not with the scared hiss of your breath and the tremble in your hands and the searing pain that sinks itself down into your marrow in a way you think will stay with you forever. Not with the eyes that see and the ears that hear and the tongue that tastes the blood in your mouth and the hunger in your stomach. Not with the steady and reassuring thump of your heart, so loud in the cage of your chest.

So instead you close your eyes, little slip of paper clutched firmly in your working hand, and resign yourself to dreams once again.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Not much to say here, except it's, once again, way longer than the original chapter. I think it's a curse or something. Regardless, a thank you goes out as per usual to my delightful beta who fixes my awkward word problems without laughing at me. Which is a definite bonus. Enjoy!

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**Chapter 2**

You cry when you pry the staples out five days later.

They've started to itch and rust and every breath stabs you along the incisions, straining as the healing flesh tries to morph around them until they become part of you. You can no longer straighten up, your bony shoulders hunched in defeat, for every time you try they pull until little rivulets of red leak down your cracked porcelain body, pooling in the dip of your hipbone and over the curves of your breasts. It hurts so much that you've begun to feel something less than human; a beast chained in an invisible cage.

So instead you hunt through the halls, your skeleton hands feeling along the door frames and walls, scrabbling for switches - you have acquired an almost paralysing fear of the dark despite being able to see through it, for it reminds you of things you can't picture, yet, but drag up such a sense of disquiet that it takes you hours to calm yourself down. You roam through the rooms and cover your mouth at the bodies there, slumped and forgotten, their parts scattered about and left to rot. If you had enough strength, you would give them a proper funeral.

As it is, you can barely find the energy to pray.

But an hour ago you had wandered into the forsaken morgue. For the longest time you had tried to avoid the place like the plague that has taken over your mind, diverting through the ways you now know so well, doing all you can to forget about the cold steel doors leading to the land of the dead.

_Medical supplies_, your tired mind had said,_ I need that. Another infection could kill me. _

And then you remembered the hole in your head and stranded yourself between laughing or crying.

Now you're here, naked again, staring at yourself through the reflection in the grimy mirror. If possible you've grown yet more emancipated since you woke up - food is scarce, hope is scarce, life is scarce. Somebody must have swept the place before you came to be, as the shelves were wiped clean and scattered, empty bottles of water littering the ground. Luckily the tap still runs. Not that it matters terribly; you've spoken maybe a handful of words in the time you've wandered.

Sometimes you wonder if it's worth it. What are you living for? Curling in the corner and staying there until the eternal sleep takes you seems a much simpler option. Something to look forward to in an attempt to escape this hell.

You shake your head to rid yourself of your thoughts. Once upon a time, you think you were more optimistic. Memories come to you in shards upon the dead of night, splicing names and faces into your thoughts. You're a patchwork quilt made up of the voices of others - they speak to you in dream and you respond, a part of you coming alive only to wither away once you open your eyes. Nothing but the blank slate of these spattered walls and the chained doors that impede your journey to the outside world.

_Come on, Britt. _You steel yourself, reaching for the tweezers you found in one of the drawers. They had looked clean, at least, better than the crusted ones found sporadically strewn across the counters. Some look angry enough to have been weapons in another life, the jagged saw blades tarnished in the harsh lighting. _Get this over with._

As you pour the rubbing alcohol all over your front, you smear it into your wounds with your other hand, flinching back from the sharp sting that bites at your still unhealed flesh. You shimmer in the lights, casting shadow over the indent of every rib, forcing it to reflect dimly over your hair. One silver lining was the finding of a working shower - you stood under the spray for an eternity and drank it in until you choked, your lungs sputtering to expel the water that had trickled through. It hurt, but you felt real.

For a moment, you simply stare at your reflection. Can you do this? Are you willing? Your fingers trace the scars that will (hopefully) hold themselves together. To think that mere days ago your inner workings were splayed out for the world to see.

Your hand jerks harshly at reaction to that thought, and you stifle a whimper of pain as the first staple clatters to the floor. Each falls with a quiet clink, one by one by one, a small stream of blood with each wrench as you grit your teeth and bare it; the tweezers clatter to the floor when you reach mid-belly, both hands splaying over yourself and sliding over the crimson flowing freely over your skin, slipping to find purchase. Tears drip down your nose as you hunch down to pick the tools back up, digging under the next staple, yanking it from the softness of your abdomen.

The last one falls and you cast the disgusting things away, curling both arms over yourself and resisting the urge to sink to the floor, where the blood has pooled around your feet. It creates mesmerizing spirals as it slides down the length of your trembling thighs, hiding in the crevices of your toes. When your hand goes for the alcohol bottle it shakes so hard that it slips from your fingers and shatters, its precious substance mixing lazily with your own essence.

"Fuck!" You curse, harsh and angry, stepping away from the mess. There's no point cleaning it up - who would step in it? You? The dead man on the table, grown bulging and putrid with rot? Even now his face nauseates you, eaten away from the inside until his eyes have simply... disintegrated in his skull. In time, the rest of his flesh will hold the same fate.

If it's the last thing you do, you refuse to let yourself ever become like that.

A shuffle as the doors swing on their hinges... and you remind yourself once again that it's not just you that has to live in this filth.

The man you've shared the compound with is... strange. He doesn't say anything. You think he's maybe lost the ability to talk, evidenced by the nasty wound on his throat that gapes even now. His once pristine suit is soiled with blood, gashes on the fabric of his arms glimpsing at the pale, waxen skin that is hidden underneath. You can hear him coming from all the way across the building by the shuffling gait as he drags one limp foot behind him. What unnerves you is his stare - the eyes that look at you aren't conscious. They hold no spark of human intelligence behind them. The film is soured milk smeared over his sight, but he always seems to find you.

"Hello again," you greet in an effort to be cheerful, "what's got you excited this time?"

His response is a low, rattling moan; something that never ceases to send chills spiralling down the long length of your spine. You've noticed that he only does it when he sees something that he's never seen before.

"What do you want?" You ask him. "The mirror?"

_Nnnnnnnggghhhh._

"No... the bottle?"

_Raaaaaaaaggggnnnn._

You frown and clear your throat nervously as he shuffles towards you.

He's done this before. Perhaps you should feel violated, sometimes, but there's nothing malicious about his touch. Simply... curious, if you could relate it to him. His fetid breath blows across your face as he leans in close - your gorge rises as you spy the swarming mass of larvae curling just underneath the surface of his skin, crawling out the cavities of his eyes, swirling in the gape of his mouth. He huffs once, head shifting down to your torso.

It's been long enough that you know something's not _right_ about this place. This man is clearly sick... evidenced by the way his clammy fingers drag themselves across your breast and your newly aggravated wounds, palm slicking itself with blood. You yelp and jump away, feet crunching hard on the broken glass as he raises his fingers to his face and begins to chew.

It only lasts a second. He slows, stops, and finally lets his slimy fingers fall limply from his mouth, turning to shuffle back the way he came.

You stand there for a long time before you follow him out the door.

It's best to go in the opposite direction, to the showers. The less contact you have with this... man (loosely used), the easier it will be to live out however remaining days you have trapped in this hell. Perhaps whatever he has is contagious? The phantom feeling of bugs crawling over your skin makes you grimace and turn the shower dial to scalding.

Your head tips back as the water cascades over your skin, washing away the blood that has begun to dry in wobbly trails. It feels something like renewal - you stand upright for the first time in a week and allow the stretch to extend so fully you fear you might again split apart at the seams, dropping back into normal stance only when your bones click satisfyingly into place. Ever so slowly you try a smile upon your mouth. It feels wrong and forced, all the muscles stiff and unused to such strange movement. But it's the first all the same and it counts for something you care not to name.

It is in times like these that you wonder if something is legitimately wrong. The shower is as hot as it can go, and the world has begun to fill with haze, and your skin steams as it turns pink and raw from scrubbing. The fog in your mind has not lifted yet, not in its entirety, but you no longer sweat through whatever clothes you can possibly find in this place. There are still moments where you forget yourself entirely, staring out into space for what could possibly be hours on end, but these are fewer and far between. Against all odds, you seem to be getting... better?

Or maybe simply better _adapted _to this strange state of being.

Somebody once told you (your sister? it sounds like her voice, harsh sarcasm riding with an underlying affection in every word she speaks) that insanity is hard to define, because everybody feels it in a different way.

Sometimes you think you remember her smile in your mind, but it floats away like the cold, angry mist of your breath in the basements of this place.

You're just so _lonely_.

When you have stood under the spray for so long you think you'll suffocate in the wet air of the bathrooms, you step out onto the frigid tiles. The small cuts in your feet from the glass sting as you pad across the grout, one hand wiping down a small mirror, shaking water from your hair as you search in the cabinets opposite. This has been your only lucky find - filled to the brim with medical supplies, everything that you could need for however long fate deems you to stay here. It was obvious that somebody had previously attempted to break in and take your precious goods from the bloody fingerprints raking along the outside of the wood, but their efforts were in vain. You were the one that had to drag the limp body out into the main hallway.

After it was done you threw up from over-exertion and the blood you felt congealed under your nails.

_It should be strange that I'm getting used to it._ You think as you worm your way into a pair of old sweats, tying the strings as tight as they'll go around your bony waist. They're ratty and there's a hole in the knee, but they keep you warm at night and stop you from feeling like the captured animal you sometimes think you are. It freezes you right down to your exposed marrow - you must be somewhere up north. You doubt Texas would try and turn you into a glacier.

Sometimes you think of taking the boards off the windows. You crouch and trace the knots in the ragged wood with the tips of your fingers, leaning against the sterile-white walls, yearning for the sunlight and the embrace of the moon. It has been so long that the touch of the sun has warmed you that you remember it only in passing, in a distant memory of grass and fields and blue, blue skies. But something inside you knows it wouldn't be your best option - in the dead of night you hear _things_ outside, wheezing moans and rattles and lonely cries into the open air. The sound of gravel being scraped across the earth wounds your ears and you always recoil, dragging yourself back into the corner of deeper darkness where you have made your temporary home.

The man always looks at the doors on those nights, staring emptily at the chains that impede his freedom. Once you asked him if he wanted to leave, but he simply ignored you before shuffling away.

A burn in your arm takes you back to the present. You hiss as you run your wounded forearm under the tap, brushing away the sharp stacks of dry blood that dig into your tender, puffy skin, exposing the broken meat underneath. Though your elbow is still difficult to move and your hand would rather not clench, it has ceased being an ache that resonates into every fiber of you, instead becoming an almost forgettable pain if not aggravated. With every day that passes the infection around it becomes a little less red, a little less hot. Your head clears as your flesh knits - if you find enough food to sustain you, there might be hope on the horizon yet.

Water scorches your throat when you gulp down your daily penicillin pills found in the depths of the cabinet, used with palpable relief in the first few days when you could scarcely hear the world over the sound of your heartbeat. After that, white paste is smeared carefully into the wound (you don't know what it is, but it sounds helpful) and a freshly washed bandage is rewound over it until no inflamed skin is seen. After that comes a bra you found in one of the lockers (it feels really strange to be wearing somebody else's underclothes, but you visibly cringed at the thought of taking it from the dead) and a men's checkered shirt, buttoned up loosely and rolled to your elbows. It hangs like a tent from your scrawny frame but you feel normal within its comfort. Safe.

The feeling doesn't stay. Vapour curls over your bare feet and disappears into the hallways with but a whisper of warmth when you open the door, and the first thing that hits you is the overwhelming stench of all the rotting corpses littering the compound. Your nose wrinkles but it doesn't trigger your gag reflex as it usually does - instead, you go to find your meager stash of food and resign yourself to finally doing something about the dead.

You perch upon the desk in the main lobby as you munch thoughtfully from a can of watery tuna. Though recovering, you certainly aren't strong enough to drag each and every body into one single room, especially those from all the way across the building. They should be cleared from the hallways, maybe the more important rooms... should you carry some to the morgue? A shiver rolls down your spine at the thought of those silver tables and you mentally cross it from your list. Various rooms it is, then. Not like you need them all.

When you finish you leave the can on the counter, draining it down to the last salty drop. To this day you don't know how the man doesn't lose weight even though you've never seen him eat... maybe he's the one stealing the goldfish crackers from your little stash. With a sigh, you crack your fingers and get to work.

So many dead in this place. This happens with very little order to the design - you wander aimlessly and cover their expressionless faces with sheets; reuniting those who you believe husband and wife, tucking children into the sides of their parents. Those who died alone join the one room at the end of the hallways, heaved laboriously on ruined blankets across the floor. Their disturbed flesh creates the worst smell ever known to you (that you can remember, anyway, which isn't much) and you scrounge desperately for a medical mask until you secure it over your face and return to your grim task. It doesn't help much with the stench, but the psychological comfort never hurts.

Once, laying a lone body to rest in the dark room rapidly filled with decay, your heart stops in your chest as its hand reaches out and clamps around your wrist with a groan of discontent. You shriek, falling over in your scramble to get away, accidentally kicking it square in the nose. There is a snap and its head lolls back, black blood dribbling onto the floor.

"Oh my god, I'm so sorry... I didn't know you were alive." You get up on your knees and hover over it... him? No, her. The clothes give the otherwise unrecognizable face away. "But you scared me so badly... couldn't you have given me a different sign? I think I broke your nose. Or what's left of your nose, anyway..."

Your hesitant fingers touch the massacred flesh and dart hastily away at the cold, slick quality presented to you. She (it?) flails helplessly on the floor, moaning in an attempt to get closer to you, her hands scrabbling at your knees and gripping at the hems of your pants. "Okay, um, I'm going to, uh, get a blanket or something because you're obviously not well. Just stay here, okay? Don't move."

A dumb statement, considering she has no legs left to speak of save dirty bones poking out from the shattered remnants of her knees. You stumble to your feet and run into your supply area, a room fortified with boards and metal pipes across the windows, and pick up a ratty blanket from the pile that you don't use. When you return to that macabre little room, she's barely moved an inch.

"You must be cold, right? I get cold and I still have all my pieces." She turns her head to you, and you cringe. "I'm really sorry, that was mean of me. Here... do you want this? It might help." You flutter the blanket over her body and she stills for a moment, her head turning to suck the blanket into her mouth. She seems to consider it for a moment, slack jaw now working with determination, before she falters and spits it back out. Your face falls as she lays her head down with a muttered wheeze of despair.

"I'm sorry," you say miserably, "I wish there was more I could do. You're just... in really bad shape. I'm not a doctor." At this, you grin. "I can't even fix my own head. I think whoever did this messed something up inside, you know? Like I have broken brains."

Her eyes watch you sightlessly and you start to giggle thoughtlessly. "Yeah, broken brains! I have broken brains and you can have broken bones. We'll be like... like sisters! Except I'm the prettier one, I think." You don't even have it in you to apologize.

* * *

Over the next few days you finally complete your work until it looks like it could host some semblance of life. Various doors are shut tight to keep away the lingering smell of rot, drapes placed over the decaying bodies, whispered apologies to the little children who are much too still against their parents' sides. You visit your _sister_ every day, sitting next to her and rambling on about anything you can think of. She doesn't talk much, like the strange man, but the incoherent grunts and grumbles are still comforting in a world with no noise except the tap of your footsteps. You like her better, anyway. The other day he dropped part of his arm in the main hallway and it was so disgusting it took you two hours to work up the courage to move it. (Now you're sure there's something wrong with this place.)

Sometimes you're glad she doesn't seem to eat, because your already feeble stash of food is running dangerously low. Soon enough you're going to have to brave the outside world and scrounge for whatever you can find... maybe somebody can give you insight into this nightmare building. There has to be houses somewhere nearby, right?

Your frame doesn't get any larger, still a moving skeleton showing all the sharp angles of its stature, but it doesn't get any smaller either. Getting yourself to do chores has improved your focus, allowed you to work off the aches and pains of your injuries. Ever so slowly you start to gain mobility in your left arm - it is stiff and awkward but it no longer makes you cry if you drop something on it - and the gashes upon your torso begin to heal, ever so slowly sealing until they will knit themselves together into glossy pink lines as a souvenir of what-has-been.

You hate them, but you realize there's nothing you can do. It's not like anybody here really cares what you look like.

"Do you know what's going on?" You ask Velma one day - her name now, because she refuses to give her own and just pronouncing it makes you laugh - with your face stuffed full of mushy corn. Days and nights go by absent of you. It is like somebody has taken the minutes out of the hour and all seconds are frozen, churning by so slow as you crave the touch of natural light so fiercely it scares you at times. You have grown to loathe these crimson painted walls as much as the people who undoubtedly made them this way.

She grumbles and rolls herself towards you the best she can, her freezing hands clamping onto the fabric by your knee. "I guess you're as clueless as me, right? You must be for somebody to have been that mean to you."

You don't know how she lives with her legs shattered like they are. If you were her, you would have dragged yourself into the bathrooms and drowned the best you could in the single, tiny bath. You think you tried it once anyway, in your sleep, for you woke up in the freezing water under the surface, the world distorted through a shimmery haze. It took three hours to warm back up again.

Velma mumbles her agreement and mouths toothlessly at the hole in your sweats, her cold spit swathing your knee. "Ew, that's gross! You know I hate it when you do that!" You jerk away and she simply lets out a huff of air, rolling back on her stomach to glare blindly at the floor. With a grimace, you wipe the grey, gooey substance from your skin with a stained blanket lain over one of the slain.

"Sometimes I think you have broken brains too. Who tries to lick another person?"

You've tried to tend to the wound in your head, but how does one go about cleaning a hole that leads straight into your skull. Once you watched in morbid fascination as your finger travelled all the way down the channel, recoiling only when you touched a soft, spongy substance and your world exploded into such bright fire you slumped on the floor for the rest of the night. Ever since then you've kept all objects away from the vicinity of your head, instead doing the best you can to hide it with your remaining hair.

It's not all that successful, but it isn't that disgusting anymore, so you count it a victory.

As you spoon the last mouthful of your pathetic meal into your mouth, you almost spit it back out when a loud crashing noise reverberates through the hallways. You still and stiffen silently, listening intently for any source of dispute. _It's probably just the man tripping over another table, _you think uneasily, but startle at the distinctly human voice that meets your ears.

Male. It's deep and dark and desperate, highlighted with the yelling of a few other tones mixed it. _Multiple, then._ It's been so long since you've heard another human voice (your memory is but a void of darkness, so really this is the _first_ you have heard, and it sears itself as the beginning of a new life) that you stumble on yourself as you make your way to where it comes from, the slamming on the doors growing in intensity the longer it takes.

"Please, if there's anybody there, let us in! They're coming for us!"

_They?_ Closer now, you pick up the wheezing moans of the things outside, whatever they are, presented with a new fervour never known to you. They've morphed into shrieking groans that stack up on themselves until it's a wall of noise that makes you want to crouch down and block them out, but the persistent voice has taken on a tone of madness.

"I know there's somebody in here! Whoever you are, you have to open the door! They're going to kill all of us!"

A crunch, and he simply grows in ferocity. "Open the fucking door!"

You swallow once, laying your hand against the cool metal. "U-um... hello?"

The pounding stops for a second, and when the mysterious person speaks up again, the relief seeping through his voice almost floors you. "Oh thank god, there's somebody in there. You gotta open this door, there's dozens of zoms out here! We can't take 'em all."

_Zoms?_

There's a scuffling noise, and a shrill female voice. "Noah, you can't simply demand to enter somebody's safehouse! For all they know we could be infected too! Maybe this needs a more feminine touch."

"Rachel, you can shove your feminine touch up your-"

A thwack and a groan of pain, coupled with an irritated shout to _shut the fuck up and help._ Your eyebrows raise high over your forehead and you wonder vaguely what kind of a group this has to be.

"Hello, kind stranger!" The new voice greets. "What my comrade was trying to say was that we would be so grateful if you let us inside, as we are running on limited sleep and are severely overwhelmed. I know it must be risky to take a mass of strangers into your place of refuge, but I assure you that we are all healthy and disease free."

"Maybe you, but I don't know about Puck."

"Shut the fuck up, Lopez! I don't see you keeping it in your pants either!"

An irritated sigh, and you can almost hear the eyes rolling throughout the group. "Ignore those two. I promise that if you reach past their hoodlum exterior they have a certain charm that grows on you... much like a fungus."

Your eyes float down to the chains linking the handles together. They look sturdy, and there's nothing here to break them that you can see. (And if there was, could you? You are nothing more than skin and bones these days.) "I would love to let you in, but, um, I-I don't know how to take off these locks."

"Oh, I see. Are there any alternate exits that we should know of?"

They're all locked in the same fashion, sturdy and near impossible to budge.

"They're all locked too."

The voice falters here. "I-is there any way you could possibly unlock it? I'm afraid we don't have much time." To demonstrate, there is a loud bang with a sharp yelp of surprise and you duck instinctively, hands curling over your ears. _Gunshots? What the hell are they doing? _The ringing in your head disorients you, and it takes a few precious seconds to realize they're calling out to you from across the barrier.

"Y-yeah, uh," you remember a gleam of metal in the depths of your recent memories and curse your deteriorating luck, "I think I know where the keys are. Hold on a minute."

Of course, your hurried path leads you straight to the morgue. The smell here is near unbearable, and you've long gotten used to the constant odour of decay hovering otherwise in the rest of the compound. You grimace, nose crinkling, and gingerly side-step the still shattered glass as you make your way to the occupant still splayed out on the autopsy table.

His staples have burst and from that his insides are laid out in gruesome detail inside his body, some of his bloated innards drooping over the flimsy barrier of his abdomen. All that truly remains pure is the white of his teeth, and even those have begun to bear the badge of deterioration. Clenched in his putrid right hand is the gleam of a large metal keychain, his shattered fingers looped through the ring and held so tight some of the keys puncture into the flesh of his palm. You shudder as you reach him, fingers carefully reaching to peel away his grip.

From across the room, the strange man looks in the direction of the banging with all his apparent senses on high alert. It sends a foreboding feeling through your body.

One by one, you slowly tug at his hand, revealing your prize. The feeling of his skin is disgusting in a way you can't describe, the texture rising bumps that prickle all along your arms just to under your ears. He finally falls away with a wet _thump_ and you breathe out in victory, shaking the excess gore from the teeth of the keys and turning to walk away.

On second hesitation, you mutter a quiet _sorry_ under your breath as you prop a broom handle across the morgue doors, impeding the slow, methodical boom of the man who tries to escape. You didn't like the hunger you saw in his eyes.

Your feet slap against the tile as you shuffle through the keyring, flipping them over to read the scrawl as you go. _Back door, kitchen, safe, laundry- _you have a laundry room? - _room 1, room 2... _

When you reach the door again you run straight into it, groaning as you hold your head in one hand. The noise outside has reached a fever pitch, full of people screaming and things hitting flesh and bodies thumping to the ground. Though it might be from the overwhelming stench inside your compound, you think you smell fresh blood that spills to the floor with each meaty _whump_ of a weapon against a person. Your hands shake as you flip through the rest of the keys.

"Side door, side door, side door..." It's distracting with the girl begging at you to hurry up, but you finally cry out in triumph as you find the small, silver key. It fits into the lock perfectly and the chains slither as they fall away.

You wrench open the doors and take in a moment to view the world outside; your eyes instantly burn as the sunlight you haven't seen in a week assaults your nervous system, flinching away and retreating back into the relative gloom. From here you can see multiple shapes rushing past you, all in various states of disarray, backpacks stuffed to the brim and clothes stained with blood. In the brief moment where they clear out from the steps, you think you see what Hell has always looked like.

The people here... they're all like the strange man and your sister. They moan and shriek and wheeze in their own language, hands grasping at thin air, fighting all over themselves to reach you first. Horrible diseases eat at their skin and render them mockeries of the human countenance, mouths open in hungry snarls. It is their eyes that haunt you - they aren't even the eyes of an animal. No, they are eyes of monsters. Before you can stare for too long, two strong hands grab your shoulders and wrench you away, shutting the doors firmly with a solid bang.

The chains are re-attached, and it sounds a lot like safety.

"What the hell are you doing?!" Yells a large boy with a mohawk, glaring at you from where his hands are still clamped around your upper arms. "Are you trying to get us killed? Huh? Is that what you want?"

Another boy, taller with black hair and a kind slant to his mouth, places his hand over your attacker's neck. "Lay off, Puck! She just saved our asses from being ripped to shreds."

It's so hard to think with so many people swirling about you, curious eyes glancing over every inch presented to them, tapping at the walls of your home and peering down the hallway. The frenzy outside booms so loud in your head that you have to squeeze your eyes shut in pain, your temple crying agony as the madness continues on.

"Hey, is she okay?"

"God, it stinks in here."

"Do you think there's any running water?"

Your eyes clench further.

"Stop it!"

It's only when all the noise ceases and you acquire the distinct feeling of being watched do you realize it was you that shouted. You crack open one lid, painting a sheepish smile over your face that feels as if it is hanging on by little threads.

"I'm sorry, it's just been a long time since there's been other people talking."

One girl pushes through to give you a sympathetic smile. With the pipe clenched in her fist and the determined set to her stance, you like her immediately. The blond boy seems to like her, too.

"We get you, girl. We've been stuck together for so long we don't notice when somebody else is tryin' to talk. You live alone here?"

Your muscles start to unwind, and your smile becomes a little more genuine.

"No, there's two other people. My sister and the strange man."

Her brows knit together. "The strange man?"

"Yeah, he doesn't talk much. He has a nasty cut right over his throat so I think he can't anyway. It's all _nnnnngh _and _rrrrrghhhh_ and he kind of stumbles around like a paralysed hamster."

She opens her mouth to speak, but before she can somebody shouts from further down the hallway. You see a tall boy, with a head full of messy black hair, staring at the metal doors of the morgue with a permanently stunned expression on his face. In one hand he clutches the broom handle, and in the other a black mass that you can't properly identify from this distance. A rotting hand reaches for him, and he shouts a startled _zom! _before raising the object eye level. A bang roars through the hallway and stuns you with its power, startling all the other occupants in the room.

The strange man tumbles to the floor, and a pool of black spreads where his body has fallen. One of your hands cups over your mouth, and the choked sound you make is instinctual. _A gunshot._

"What did you do to him?" It's such a breathy whisper that the girl has to lean in to hear, but the next second you're pushing through the milling throng, running instead to where the boy still stands with an inscrutable look on his face. You bare your teeth at him like the animal you had almost become, and he backs away with both hands raised by his head.

"What did you do to him?" You repeat with more force, crouching by his face and ghosting your fingertips along the battered outlines of his features. One knuckle grazes the bullet in the middle of his forehead. "We match now." You say to him, snickering past the utmost confusion. "See? I told you we would find something in common eventually!" Not for the first time, he doesn't respond.

But it's permanent now.

A hand falls to your shoulder and you flinch away from the touch, looking upwards at the same girl who had talked to you earlier. "What's your name?" She asks you cautiously, eyeing the corpse on the floor with something bordering on fear.

"Brittany," you say, though it comes out more as a song, "at least, I think so. I don't remember."

"You don't remember?"

"Nope! It's all just gone. Poof, like the wind! Or whatever the wind is. I haven't been outside in a long time. What's your name?"

"Mercedes." She says slowly, and you like the way it wraps around your tongue. "Brittany, I need you to tell me... your sister, does she look like the man?"

"No, of course not." You scoff, and she relaxes for a second until you continue on. "She's a girl, right? She's not really my sister. I just call her that because we have things that are kinda similar. For the most part she just lays in her room because she doesn't have any legs."

You lean forward, as if imparting a secret. "I think whoever destroyed this place broke her too, just like they broke me."

Mercedes looks at you with the kindest sympathy in her eyes and beckons forward another girl. Dark hair and darker eyes, so black you could fall into them like you tumble into the abyss of your corner where you dream of restless ghosts. In her left hand she holds a nasty looking knife, and her right knuckles are covered by a sturdy layer of brass. She eyes you like she doesn't know whether to place you in a museum or a mad house.

"You have to put her down, Santana," says Mercedes quietly, laying a touch over the shadow's - Santana's - wrist, "who knows how many there are in here."

"Are you sure she'll let us?" Her voice is smoke that you breathe into your battered lungs and it drives you far from this place, high up above the cloudless sky. The cadence of the rough exhale that blows out with her questioned words sails you into the trees, caught in the branches of your thoughts. You fracture, deflate, rebuild; all to the sound of their mesmerizing conversation.

"I don't know... she's sick. Who else would make friends with zombies?"

"There are a lot of closed doors, Mercedes," she says doubtfully, and through your closed eyes you see the downturn of her brows, "and whoever the hell this chick is, she's wearing her own brand of crazy. I think we should move on."

This time the boy from before chips in - the one with the kind smile. "We don't have anywhere else to go. These doors will hold for as long as we need them to with those chains, and we're all tired. We should sleep here at least for a day."

A sigh - you're not sure who it is, but finally Santana relents. "Fine. But we need to do a whole sweep of the building." She crouches down and you open your eyes once again, immediately startled by how close her face is to yours. Her gaze travels across the story of your features, reading your birth in your pupils and your childhood in the line of your nose, coming across the pinpricks of your growing madness in the worried set of your mouth. Her hands pry you open and she takes though you have nothing to give, stuck in her spell until she looks away to break the incantation.

"How many are there?"

"How many what?"

Frustrated, she starts to bare her teeth. "_Zoms._ How many walkers are still here?"

Your head tilts ever so slightly, and you inhale the musk of her scent. It drowns you. "Nothing walks here except for me. Sister has no legs, remember?"

She slaps her palms loudly against the meat of her thighs and you jump. Distractedly, you notice they are all larger than you, muscle where you are simply bone. Survivors.

"How many fucking zombies are there in this fucking building, Brittany?!"

Your stare holds hers for so many fragile seconds that you see her start to become uncomfortable, backing up from your unwavering gaze. Ever so slightly your mouth twitches; one second you are silent, and the next you're slumped in the ground with hoarse, broken laughter escaping in rough staccato from your chest.

"Z-zombies?" You stutter, snorting until the healing wounds on your torso pang uncomfortably at the movement of your ribs. "Who ever said something about zombies?"

She flails wordlessly at his corpse on the ground, so the one that shot him helpfully pipes up. "Oh, I don't know, maybe just the rest of the world?"

"Shut your mouth, boy." Mercedes grumbles. "She ain't been out into the world recently, if you can't tell."

You nod seriously, looking around at the bloody walls. "No world for me. This is my world, with the dark and the dead. There are a lot of dead people here." _They aren't very good company,_ you reflect, _but neither are these people. _Santana throws her hands in the air and backs up, letting Mercedes take her place.

"Britt, look..." she trails off for a moment, grimacing as somebody opens one of the doors and a rather strong gust of decay reaches them across the hallway. "You need to tell us where your sister is. She can't be all that happy, right?"

"I don't think she feels much of anything." _I feel it all for her._

"You said she has no legs, right? That must hurt a lot. I think she would thank you if you let her go."

You frown, your bony hands tracing over the protrusions of your knees. In your mind, your brain tries to come up with the thought of slicing them off and the agony it must produce, but the only pain you can remotely compare it to is when you first woke up and your whole world was nothing but a tunnel of heat and shadow that reversed on itself, over and over, until you'd pass out on the cool tiles from exhaustion. It makes you shudder. "But... I like her."

"I know you do, sweetheart. I bet she likes you too. But do you want to keep her here, or do you want to set her free?"

One of your hands clench into a fist and she covers it carefully - from here you note just how thin you really are, and she must, too, for she cups it in its entirety until her smooth, chocolate complexion swallows it whole. Your lips tremble and your voice is quiet as you look away.

"She's in the last room to the left."

You see Santana nod, nothing but the dull _tap tap _of her boots intruding upon the silence as she briskly makes her way down the corridor. The door swings open and she steps inside.

A moment later there is a shuffle and a loud _crack_, and you close your eyes as you lose the only piece of family you've known.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

They settle themselves around the compound without really asking, but you suppose you wouldn't have kicked them out anyway. What's one of you to so many of them? They have no wounded among them, not that you can tell, but all of them look so very tired. Their muscles are wound taut like they're tugged along on invisible strings, and the hardness of their faces is reflected with every sharp turn of their pronounced bones and the way they grip their makeshift weapons like they're the only lifeline they've ever known. The blood on their clothing has dried black.

Mercedes sees you watching them so warily, like one of them would come and sink their knives in you, too, (sharp like the teeth of your sister-no, stop, it's too soon) and she sighs, dragging a chair beside you. Her exhale is exhausted when she sits and you wonder how long they've been ghosts of themselves.

"The world's gone to hell." She says plainly with her chin in her palm. Your eyes float to her naturally - she has an aura about her, almost as commanding as the Shadow's from where she cleans her knife across the room.

Your silence allows her to continue. "People are dying by the millions, whole cities have been abandoned, we're starving 'cause everybody stole each other's food when the pandemic broke out. You can try and reach the government, sure, but who's to say they didn't start this whole mess? We've been doing fine on our own."

In the deeper reaches of the hospital you can hear their voices, lightened without the heavy load of survival on their backs. They seem almost child-like in their delight, calling out rooms that they claim and their curiosity palpable as they search through what you have done to this place. Your brow furrows slightly, and you tilt your head towards her.

"Pandemic?"

She looks at you then, assessing the seriousness of your statement. When your face remains blank, her eyebrows shoot up so high you think you'll never see them again. "You don't know 'bout the zombies?"

Again the laughter threatens to bubble up, but the flat tone of her voice quells it. "You were serious?"

She throws her hands up by her head. "What the hell did you think those things were outside? Or in here? Hell, how'd you not get eaten?"

You scratch the side of your head in thought. "I dunno... the man never really liked me. He touched my boobs a few times, but I think that was just because he'd never seen them before. My sister tried to lick me, but she was all cold and smelled bad so I just avoided her whenever she tried."

"And neither of them bit you?"

Your hand almost clamps itself around the tender split of your arm, and you catch yourself at the last second in order not to give anything away. The warning in her words tells you that if you said _yes_, the result would be less than favourable. More than ever you feel yourself start to panic under so many watchful eyes.

"No... were they supposed to?"

Mercedes snorts and shakes her head again, turning to view the hallway into which her companions have disappeared. "You're some kind of special, Britt. Only you would find a friendly zombie."

You're not sure whether it was a compliment, so instead you smile and bare it when the drone of voices invades you from further down the compound, the buzzing of a thousand flies that still sit in the rotting mouth of the dead man in the morgue. After so much silence their presence is jarring, throwing you off the fragile axis that you had created out of nothing more than the silver threads of your sanity, prompting a stabbing pain in your temple that you thought you had released weeks ago. They run and holler and blanch at your work, how you had so painstakingly placed the bodies of the dead where they belonged; their greedy fingers dip into the pockets of the deceased and search for supplies, the dead to aid the living at something they themselves failed to do.

From a distance you hear their words. "How can somebody live like this?" One asks, closing the door to yet another room full of rot.

"I don't know," responds another, "but it stinks in here. It's worse than that bus we found on the highway."

"You kidding? It's worse than _anything_ we've seen."

Your teeth grit. They want to be ungrateful? You could always open the door and let your friends flood the room, let them hunger after the tough flesh they so seem to desperately want. You could lose yourself in the pulse of cold bodies until you became nothing more than a faceless blur in a land of monsters. Isn't that what you've wanted from the start? To disappear? A hand touches your knuckles and you start, flinching with a gasp until you register Mercedes watching you with a concerned frown.

"Sorry," you mutter, "I do that sometimes. My head's broken."

"Broken?"

"Yes, broken!" You snap, drawing away. "They broke this place and they took me with it! They thought I was bad and they put a hole in me, but I'm not! At least, I don't think I am. Not like some of the bad men here."

They talk to you sometimes with unmoving mouths; their stories are the tales of their existence when they were still around to live it - how they did horrible things in the name of pleasure and the people they harmed came back to haunt them with hungry mouths and lifeless eyes. You sit in their rooms of rot and listen until the clamour of their voices overwhelm you, and you drag yourself into the hallway, weak and afraid, but you can't stop.

"Tina can look at your hole, if you want?" Mercedes offers kindly. "She's the resident medic around here. Girl has magic hands, I swear it."

She points to a shorter girl with long, dark hair, leaning into the side of the boy with a kind smile. They fit together as two things should, linking into the hollows left behind. Her hands are long and graceful, and you decide you like them, but you don't trust them. Yet.

"No," you say with a crooked grin, showing hints of blunt teeth, "that's okay. Maybe later. I think it's stopping now."

Your legs jump with unending energy and you push yourself off your seat, doing a few quick twirls where you stand. You think you were a dancer, before. It makes sense that your feet certainly aren't the prettiest-dancers sometimes push themselves beyond what their bones can take. At almost every movement you unconsciously put a flourish on it, gliding through the hallways on limbs that remember what your mind has forgotten.

(Just another reason to trust the body and not the brains. The body _knows_ and doesn't try and trick you with false-truths and shattered memories. It just _is_.)

"Do you want a tour?" Your head turns to her with your eyebrows raised. It feels strange, pulling expression onto your face again. "It'll be less scary that way if you have to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I did that once and tripped over a head. He wasn't very happy with me."

Mercedes grimaces and nods her consent, getting up on weary legs. "Won't hurt. Satan, you coming?"

Shadow looks up for a second and studies you intensely before getting up with a massive sigh. Her joints creak and you can hear them from where you stand. She looks exhausted-they all do. Little bodies with big sorrows hanging heavily from the curve of their shoulders.

"Told you not to call me that, Wheezy."

"With that scowl on your face it's exactly what you look like, girl. We're safe for once. Relax a bit."

Her hand, still clutching her knife, sweeps about the hallways. "If we don't get eaten from whatever surprise is behind door number one, we'll die of disease or some shit. Have you lost your sense of smell recently?"

Mercedes turns to face her more completely. "We smell exactly the same. Now, if you don't get your head out your ass, I swear I will-"

"I have showers."

It scares you a little how their faces suddenly turn feral, both sets of eyes locking onto you with an animal intent. Though you're taller, surely, you suddenly feel very small.

"Where?"

"Um, down this hallway, to the left."

They speed away with an almost visible dust cloud trailing behind them. You blink, lips quirking up at one side as the two battle to see who can get through the doorway the fastest. Though both have obviously put on muscle in the time they've had to fend for themselves, Mercedes grunts and plows her way through with an audible cry of triumph. Moments later you hear the hiss of the shower beginning and the steam that will undoubtedly roll out and fill the entire compound with a heavy, humid mist.

Once again, you are alone. You tilt your head to the side and listen to the rustle as they spread out among your home, settling down with the clink of their weapons and the quiet murmur of their voices. It unnerves you, creates an itch so far down into your skin that no amount of scratching can quell. Your agitated footsteps sound loud in your ears as you find the room you avoided for hours upon hours, eyes wide and tired in the descending dark.

(They have watches. Ways to bleed meaning into the time that passes by as everything else does in this place: invisibly.)

The sweet smell of spilt blood is what creeps into your nose when you shoulder quietly into the silent space. All you can see are humps of deeper dark lining the walls, covered in ghostly sheets and shifted after they were frisked for belongings. You can see where they gave up-the bodies are still straight. Evidently, the reward was not worth the pain it caused. You meticulously go about re-aligning them with their beloved, hands placed in hands and hair smoothed down into some semblance of order. The familiar stench of death clings to you not long after you start your rounds, but you find yourself unable to care.

Yet, as always, your eyes quickly adjust to your surroundings until you can see them in detail, the split of their fingernails and the grossly distorted bodies now simply a cycle of life. They are the same as the man in the morgue and yet so very, very different... perhaps they have the eyes that stare and the breath that rots, but their maliciousness comforts you in some way. He elicits such a sense of _wrongness-_you have flashes of his face in another life; laughing, crying, begging to die-that you flinch and shy away.

You run out of distractions. Tentatively, you step forward, stopping only when your bare foot falls into a puddle of congealed black.

"Velma?" Though your voice is soft, it travels in a distortion of what it was.

Through the white noise of the ones scattered about, nothing but silence comes back to you.

You _know_ you shouldn't, you _know _it'll hurt that much more, but you crouch down regardless, your knees sinking into the cold puddle that spreads a halo from her head. Her eyes are clouded to the point where you can recognize little from within them, but the diseased blue still peeks out from the very reaches of her. One of your hands shake as you push back strands of her greasy hair, exposing the killing blow.

A nasty indent has shattered her skull and left bare the grey matter underneath, the jagged edges of the knife shredding as they retracted. Your fingers touch the broken shards scattered about, caught in the tangled snare of her hair, wet with blood and brain.

"I'm so sorry, Velma." You whisper quietly, slipping your arms under her to cradle her body as one would a child. "I never should have told them where you were."

The irony that you wish to forget even as you ache to remember is blinding, and you carefully lift her up from the stinking ground, placing her body next to all the others so she might find some semblance of companionship. You worm in after her, one arm slung about her emancipated body, head buried into the ridge of her still shoulder. Everything is so loud outside-after so long of staying with the restless dead you can hear the heartbeats of the others, the endless throb of life through them such an intrusive sound, and you bury yourself deeper in an attempt to forget the noise.

You sleep among the dead, their cold embrace wrapping you so tight you think they'll never let go.

* * *

_"What do you think they're doing?"_

_ It's a common topic now, always thrown about in whispers and simmering in half-truths. They come to you for answers but you have none, simply as clueless as they are, confined to waiting and watching and wanting. Always the wanting. A better idea, a better day, a better life._

_ This isn't fun anymore._

_ "I dunno, but I wish they'd let us out."_

_ You sit in a circle with food trays on your knees, talking about whatever comes in through these white-washed doors. These days, news is scarce, and the group often distorts it beyond recognition. The five people around you have blurred faces, unknown to you, but their voices are familiar as they reach your ears. You all have something in common, something important... why don't you remember?_

_ "Yeah. It's obviously not doing anything." One of them glances around suspiciously, looking for white coats, before leaning it to whisper to the group. "I hear they took Jake early today."_

_ A wave of hushed murmurs flow up from the group, and they all turn to you. _

_ "Is that true, Britt?"_

_ You pause mid-bite, glancing around at each and every one of these faces you know you can call friends, before thinking back to the empty bed across the room from you and the hastily thrown pyjamas, crumpled to the floor. Here, without natural light, your sleep is often troubled and unkind-how he managed to slip past you in the middle of the night you don't know. _

_ "Yeah, now that I think about it. He wasn't there when I woke up." _

_ Another explosion of furious whispering. It hurts your head, and you flinch slightly as you bring one hand up to cradle your temple. The boy next to you (_Antonio! screams your mind_) touches your knee, his face still hidden from you, but you remember big brown eyes and curly hair where only a smear is now. "You okay?" Usually any contact of his skin against yours, even indirectly, causes you to turn the worst shade of red, but today you're as pale as a ghost. _

_ "I'm fine... it must've been from this morning."_

_ His brow wrinkles in sympathy._

_ "They got you too, huh?"_

_ "Yeah."_

_ You never see Jake again._

* * *

Talking wakes you from your fractured memories. You forget for a moment that you have willingly let others into your home and tell Velma good morning, praising her for finally using words, before the last day rushes up to you and you grimace in what could be physical pain, sitting up and detaching yourself from her body. There is a tiny sliver of natural daylight floating from the boards of the windows and it illuminates the bloated face of a child, disfigured in death, and you pull yourself to your feet before staggering to the door and flinging it open. They all stare as if they had seen a ghost, and it's only now do you realize you're once more covered in blackened blood.

But are you the ghost, or are they?

You silently pass them by and duck into the bathroom, tugging the clothes from you as you go. Now that you're aware there's a laundry room somewhere in this complex, it'll make cleaning them much easier. The dial is cranked to burning and you let the steam swell and fill your lungs as you carefully unwind your bandage and step into the spray, gasping out of reflex as it scalds your skin and sears away the rest of you.

It's the first time in what must be weeks now that you can use your left arm, and you extend your elbow with care as one would carry a fragile cup. Though the area is still a knotted mess, there is no longer the sickly glint of bone shining through, tendrils of newly formed flesh snaking over and binding themselves together, sewing up the skin like poorly done stitches. It is ugly, most certainly, but it no longer looks gruesome. Concerning rather than severe. Heat does not radiate from the depths of you and the hidden pockets of your cleaved carapace.

As time passes, so too do other things change. Though the seams of you are mending over, zipping up and leaving nothing but thick lines in their wake, the continued lack of food is wrecking havoc on your overall health. The cut of your hipbones are razor-sharp, ridged, steep and grooved. Each rib is a bony finger reaching back from your spine, the line of the cage clearly visible when you inhale and it presses outwards from you. For a moment you imagine splitting yourself back open to move them further downwards, but you shake away the thought and the phantom feeling of foreign hands rifling in your workings. It feels much too real for a moment and yet another spike of memory threatens to overwhelm you before you shove it away. (Sometimes, it hurts too much to remember.)

Tapping feet sound upon the floor, and you barely have time to turn in such a way that your arm is hidden before prying eyes are upon you; you freeze as you're met with eyes so dark they are black to you peering in curiously from the other side.

"Britt?" She asks, and though she was the one to deliver death to your family, you hold no true animosity towards her. This place turned her into something she wasn't supposed to be, too.

You nod.

"We're going to have a meeting soon in the front room, if you want to join in." She shrugs like it's no big deal, but you know it means they aren't trying to shut you out. It makes a warmth, different from the burning rain, settle in your chest.

"Yeah?" You hum quietly, almost a question.

Shadow scuffs her foot on the tiles and glares at the ground, arms crossing tightly over her chest. You sense a wounded animal within her. "Yeah. It was Wheezy's idea. We gotta figure out what we're doing... and if we even _can _stay here for that long. Seriously, have you noticed the smell?"

"No, not really." You used to, all the time to the point where it made you sick, but now it's nothing more than a background to your daily life. "I kind of smelled like it for a while, so I got used to it. You should try it. One day, it might make good camouflage."

She nods slowly and sucks air through her teeth, starting to back up before she halts. "Hey... are you..." she hesitates here, scrunching up her nose like it pains her to say the words, "are you okay?"

"Sure!" You reply maybe a bit too loudly. She can only see your neck and above, though a slight portion of your side peeks out from the part in the shower stall. Where you have pressed your left arm against the tiles starts to throb accusingly. "I'm just hungry, I guess. I miss food."

A snort comes from her, and the first smile as her lips twist up at the corners. "Don't we all." She eyes you then, and you flinch away under her stare. "You're pretty thin."

"Antonio used to say that all the time." The words come from your mouth before you realize you've said them, and your brow furrows.

"Who's Antonio?" She asks it humorously, but you see her hand unconsciously floating to her weapon. "Another one of your zombie buddies?"

His name echoes in your head, like other lifetimes just out of reach.

"I... I don't know."

Seeing your face become upset again, Shadow raises her hands up and backs slowly from the room. "So uh, meeting soon. Yeah. Be there if you want to." With that, she turns on her heel and almost sprints from the room.

For a long time you spread your hands against the tiled wall and stare blankly at the rivulets that run into the cracking grout, mind open but nothing falling out. _Antonio._ You chase it through the slivers of memory, the mere fractions you find in dream. But his features remain nothing but a blurred image, what you imagine to be a smile is a scintillating smear upon the darkened canvas of a face. His voice is that which chases you in the dead of night, coaxing you to put together the shards of what you have been given. But they cut your fingers so, and you drop them back into the abyss, losing what once was held. By now, you think putting everything together would kill you. (What isn't already dead.)

Why couldn't they just have broken your body? You could have dealt with that - flesh heals given time, evidenced by the arm that slowly resembles a part of your body once again. Your hand curls angrily over the wound by your temple that refuses to close, resisting all impulses to drive your fingers deep until it forces all of the things you've lost back to the surface.

"Why did you have to do this to me?" You hiss to the unknown, curling your good hand into a fist and rhythmically battering your temple until the pain spikes through your entire head and almost knocks you off balance. "Why did you have to ruin me like this?" Again, again - flesh thuds against flesh and you can scarcely think through the assault, eyes squeezing shut and forehead leaning against the tiles long since gone cool.

One good thump sends you crashing to the ground, cradling the hammer that has taken up residence inside of your skull. It hurts to even open your eyes. You groan, long and low, the sound eerily like the one your strange man used to make. It rattles up through your chest even as you curl into a little ball and wish the world away.

It takes the water finally turning cold for you to force yourself from the floor.

Your whole body shivers, skin so bitterly cold to the touch you remember the bathtub from your first nights here, shakily dressing yourself and rewinding your bandage before hiding it under the sleeve of yet another shirt. Medicine is so rare that you don't risk taking one of the ibuprofen calling seductively from the (emptier) medicine cabinet across from you. Instead, you take slow, sluggish steps towards where you can hear the whisper of voices from far over in the compound, tracing by memory now until you emerge out into the hallway and almost all activity stops.

Mercedes smiles, beckoning you over. "There you are! I thought that you weren't coming!"

"I fell asleep."

She raises an eyebrow. "In the shower?"

"Sure." Your face remains completely blank, and she gives up on reading you.

"Right. Well, we've already started, but it's been useless bitching up to now. We can't decide on our next course of action, because some people," she turns her glare to a small girl, whose voice you recognize from across the door, "don't want to agree with anything we say."

"When you say we, Mercedes, you mean you," she says primly with a frown, legs neatly crossed, one over the other. "We have reached a general consensus within the group that there is no decided route to take, nor is there a predetermined goal that we aim to set. Honestly, we are all lucky to have survived this far."

Murmurs of agreement. Shadow speaks up with an obvious sardonic twist to her lips. "Whoa now, Rachel. It might have been your idea to come to this pit, but let's not remember that if it wasn't for Britts here, we'd all be zombie chow on her front porch. Don't get a big ego."

"She always has a big ego. Just like her nose." Another chimes in - she snorts and wordlessly high-fives the boy with the mohawk** -** Puck? - and settles back down.

Rachel huffs and leans into the side of the boy you dislike out of principle. "If anybody has a big ego here, Santana, it wouldn't be me. Who was it that decided that you are, and I quote, 'the hottest thing to grace this shitstorm of a planet?'"

Shadow quirks a brow. "That would be me, and it's also the truth."

Laughter erupts from the group, and a previously unseen character steps into the front. Through the shaggy cut of her short hair and the delicate curve of her features, you can see the hardness that makes her posture rigid and her eyes sharp. When she stands up they take notice, but only truly quiet down when she all abruptly tells them to shut up. You eye the pistol strapped to her thigh with obvious caution, the ghost of a barrel pressing to your temple making you tense up briskly.

"It's nice to know that we can all laugh together, but we really need to get things done." Her voice is like the chimes on the unseen wind that blows outside this building, mesmerizing in an entirely different way than the Shadow's. Despite the soft quality, her words are firm. "We're running out of food, running out of clothes, and running out of bullets. We're all half-insane from lack of sleep and comfort. We don't have any direction." She looks around the room. "Does any of this sound like a problem to you?"

"What should we do about it, fearless leader?" Puck asks her. "You got any food you can pull out of your ass? Hell, does Blondie over there have any food she could pull out of whatever holes her brain has?"

You look around at them as they all turn to you, but Rachel quickly pipes up.

"Noah, look at the state she's in. You can see her bones. Do you really believe she has a cache of food just lying around this compound ready to eat?"

While true, her interjection stings.

"I could be anorexic." You mumble under your breath, not knowing that she heard you. Her eyes focus upon you with startling suddenness, and you see her chest swell as she inhales a breath of air. You hurriedly cut her off before she can start.

"But I'm not. Anorexic. Or hiding food." A wistful sigh. "I miss food."

Shadow nods in agreement from your previous conversation.

"Okay, so, let's review the facts." She takes charge with a grace that makes you think she does this often, her eyes warning anybody who dare interrupt. (They linger in challenge on Rachel before they slide away, triumphant.) Mercedes whispers that her name is Quinn. "We're... what, twelve? Twelve teenagers with no communication to the outside world."

"Don't forget Mr. Schue." Pipes up the tall, mean boy, his eyes floating to the man across the hallway you hadn't noticed leaning against the wall. A moment of awkward silence until he smiles stiffly, and Quinn slowly nods in agreement.

"Fine. Twelve teenagers and one adult," you hear how her voice strains on the word, "stuck in a city that we know nothing about save for television shows and Rachel's obsessive Google tendencies. We eat a lot of fucking food, and because some of us are trigger-happy, use a lot of bullets."

"Hey!" The boy-Finn, fills in Mercedes-brightens, looking to you. "You've been, uh... living... here, right? You must know something about the city!"

Your mouth opens for a moment, but it closes again as they all turns to you again. Finally, "What city are we in?"

Rachel's eyebrows must go past her hairline. "We're in _New York_, Brittany! The Big Apple? Where people go to make their fortune with talent such as mine-ours-or fail and fall into the shadows of greatness? Where Broadway was born, the king of all theatre? How have you been here for so long yet not gone out to see it?"

Quinn snorts. "It hasn't been a great time for sight seeing. Might get a glimpse of a few dead stars, if you look close enough."

It horrifies Rachel enough to continue on.

"If you didn't remember, Finn, the doors were locked shut when we first got here. There's no way anybody's gotten in or out of here in ages."

"Which reminds me," Tina pipes up this time, "if we're going to make this our base, we really need to get rid of these bodies. So much decaying flesh in an enclosed space is really not healthy for any of us."

"Nobody said anything about staying."

"Where else are we going to go?" She asks forcefully, but not unkindly. "We're exhausted, we've got no car, and we're not in the direct heart of the city. If we fortify this place it could be a really good shelter for us."

Puck looks at her doubtfully. "I dunno, man... will these rooms ever be clean? Even if we move the corpses it's gonna stink, and it might make us sick."

"Brittany's been here forever and she isn't sick."

The still silence that engulfs the group for a moment suggests that some of them think otherwise. You place one palm flat against your temple and curl into a small ball; the ridges of your spine show from underneath your shirt.

"We can all agree that for now, here is our best bet?" Nodding heads. Mercedes turns to you. "If you would let us stay, 'course."

You look at them all from tired eyes; young faces, foreign places. What other choice do you have? It's not like you can force them out simply because they disturb the restless dead. No, they'd become the ones that haunt you after that. And besides, they'd be more likely to ignore you and continue on their way.

So instead you shrug and pointedly avoid their curious eyes. "It's not really my place anyway, it's theirs. You can move them, but they're going to be angry that you haul them outside. They yelled at me and I was just moving them into different rooms." Their silent voices echo in pointed memory.

But they won't believe you. Who talks to the dead?

Something sparks within them, and purpose gives them movement; they all seem to mobilize at once in a wall of endless noise that they are able to weave through as easily as they breathe. It speaks of a group bound together through something greater than circumstance; not for the first time, you wonder where they came from and where they've been. Perhaps you can use their memories to patch the empty ones inside your head.

The man that was leaning against the wall tries to get their attention, but it's obvious they are far more attuned to each other. Mercedes calls some of the group to her and others are with Quinn - the boy that Tina is seen with all the time (Mike, she calls him sweetly)leads a few with a quiet handand Tina oversees the procedure with careful eyes. Shadow is quick to gravitate to Quinn, the two falling into place with an old friendship that speaks its volume in silence. You seem to have said as much to the open air, as Mercedes looks at you strangely.

"Why don't you call her Santana?"

A name implies an identity, a place. You hear more than see the darkness in the undertones of her voice, the angry flashes in her eyes that flicker like the flames of a wildfire. Santana isn't... _enough_ to describe her, not yet. Not until she fills herself out as more than the vengeful ghost you see in every inch of her movement. (You know you're a dancer now; every twitch tells a story, every flinch a tragedy.)

But your mouth fails you once again and you simply shrug, the words cracking somewhere in the broken hold of your brain on the way out. "She made a shadow of my sister, so that's what she is until she lets the light in again."

Mercedes studies you for a moment before shaking her head slowly and wandering away. You don't blame her. This place will make phantoms out of all of you eventually.

They sort themselves into some semblance of order before long. You're taken to help with the removal of the bodies - not because you're strong, but because you're the only one that doesn't mind touching their falling flesh and stroking your fingers over their face to close their engorged eyes. Ever so slowly you roll them, one by one, into the large sheet, whispering apologies and lining them up outside the hallway. They mutter their discontent and let it be known on stinking exhales that make the pale boy gag, Mike goes still and quiet as more and more of them are dragged out into the harsh light that pours out from the flickering sets in the ceiling. Eventually you've emptied one room, and you have to watch your step lest you crush a ruined hand under your bare feet.

"Where are we going to put them?" The smaller boy asks (you like him, he sounds like your sanity feels), eyes tracking over the dead. "There's just so many."

Mike scratches his head, flinching away after he remembers what he's been handling. "There was a compound out back, wasn't there, Kurt? We could put them there. Have one or two people carrying while the rest are on guard."

It comes down to the conclusion that Mike and Finn will do the honours of transporting the dead, while Puck, Kurt and yourself stand on watch. You frown when Finn gingerly picks up only one side of the sheet; the body tumbles awkwardly to the floor when they attempt to lift it.

You crouch by his side. "You have to be careful!" You hiss to him, re-arranging the splayed limbs and murmuring soft _sorrys _under your breath as you roll him back onto his makeshift stretcher. "How would you like it if somebody dropped you onto the tiles?"

He huffs out a stressed breath from between his pursed lips - you see the shine of sweat beading across his brow, stark in the light. "If I was alive I wouldn't enjoy it, but he's obviously _not_. We could drag him out by the ankles for all I care."

Your hands cup the man's ears lest he hear his angry woods. You shoot Finn a dirty look, but he's already crouched down to attempt another lift. This time it goes smoother, and the first of the dead begins his slow pilgrimage into the world beyond. The five of you weave through the crowded halls, catching glimpses of the others sorting whatever supplies you may have, dragging soft objects into one room to fashion a sort of bed. There's a single cot swinging longingly in the corner underneath the boarded window, and you know their muscles ache just thinking about it. There's going to be bloodshed dealing out that privilege.

The keys jingle as you prepare to open the locks still holding strong upon the front doors, but they take an unexpected right and it sends you scrambling to catch up to them. They seem unworried, grunting as they shoulder through a doorway and pause at another - its wood is dull and chewed through by pestilence, the light seeping through the cracks sickly at best. You freeze even as they look at you impatiently.

"You going to open the door, Blondie?" Puck asks, hands clutching at the fire axe he found the night before.

"I..." Your eyes are glued to that rusted handle, the lock brown with disuse. "Why are we going down there?"

"We can't go out through the main door." Mike explains, his brow wet from the nervous sweat of handling such gruesome cargo. "There's another door that leads out into a kind of courtyard, and it'll be mostly safe to put them there. But we have to go through the basement in order to find it."

There is an animal fear within you, breaking the skin of your palms as your nails bite through the thick flesh, a blind beast that shrieks its discontent even as your hand slowly finds the right key. The basement is _wrong_ and you don't know why, don't know how, but it rises up until you shake so violently Kurt has to put a steadying hand on your back, starting when you flinch away from his touch. The lock scrapes and howls and the door is one of the moaning dead when it swings open, its gaping maw revealing the rickety staircase leading to the shadows.

Through your waking hours there have been two types of dark: the superficial shadow that you can walk through without problems, and the thick, smothering blackness that brings such terror you cease to function. This is worse than that; the smell is musty and brings back stilted conversation and the clang of rusted metal and the screams of suffering children. It smells like death.

Your breath hisses out from between your clenched teeth as you follow them down ever so slowly, their clumsy steps loud against the silence. Their heartbeats are a frenzy against your fragile ears, _bang bang bang, _and you fear this place will shatter with the sound. Your eyes swivel from corner to corner, scoping out the monsters that lurk sightlessly in the dark. Puck swears as something hits his face, but it's only the pull-cord for the lights.

It takes an age for them to flicker on, the angry generator churning loudly to life, the buzz from above the swarm of a million insects removed from their homes. A dull room comes into sight. You can't see much for the lights have blown out on the other side to leave it simply shapes of shadow; endless possibilities for nightmares to come, the shape of a hand or the glitter of unearthly eyes from just around the bend. The place reeks of cold sweat as you shuffle your way through the dirty floor, hands fumbling with the keys until you find the one you need - it slides into the lock and you shriek as a spider skitters over your hand.

You pull back for a moment, pulse pounding in the delicate hollow of your throat. Once you realize it has nothing with which it can hurt you, your body allows your fingers to turn the lock and the chains slither to the ground, exposing the world beyond.

Sunlight sears you.

With a cry of pain you pull back into the foreboding darkness, the palms of your shaking hands grinding hard into your sockets to chase away the daggers that have embedded themselves into your skull. The others flinch and grimace, too, but they seem not to be affected like you are - even after a long time of adjustment it still hurts to look directly into the horizon, where the blue sky and puffy white clouds roll past lazily, completely uncaring of the apocalypse they now flank. Trees bloom full-blooded and majestically green, their leaves reaching up to the giving sun; they are the only things unaffected by this madness, for buildings crumble and streets are rubble, the skeletons of gutted cars haunting the broken streets. Scraps of wood and metal scatter about upon the healthy grass, pieces twisted into gruesome shapes within the bodies lain upon the ground without care. Some move, some do not.

For the first time you can watch how they stumble without the constant uncomfortable feeling of being out of place-you lurk in the shadow of the doorway and see how their heads swivel ever so methodically, and how their sightless eyes scan the surroundings until they focus in on the group hastily depositing the first of many upon the ground. One call goes up until it is echoed, rebounding across the empty alleyways of this city; it strikes something within you and its sound is familiar, the same broken noise you made the very first time you woke up and found your world spinning hastily out of control.

Puck strides up, his face set into savage lines, and sinks the axe deep into the closest man's face. You muffle a cry as he goes down, the metal swinging to cut through another without care; Puck goes on and on, his blade a dark whir as bodies hit the floor, and eventually Mike and Finn join him until nothing moves save for them. A small mountain lay at their feet. He is covered in black blood, the muscles of his back rippling as he heaves.

For a moment you see that same anger that Shadow holds, stark and unkind, but it dissipates as soon as it has arrived. Puck hoists it upon his shoulder, a smirk playing at the corners of his mouth, eyebrows raising. "Come on out, Britt! We have some bodies to drag!"

By the time you're finished, you're beginning to wonder if you're the only one that's broken.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Would you look at that, I made a thing. This is the fourth installment of zombies that has taken me a while to write because... well, I'm lazy. And Battlesong is still sucking all my writing effort from me (another chapter is well on the way, for those who care to know). But here it is anyway, because everybody needs a bit of crazy in their lives. As always, great thanks to **LeMasquerade** who helped clean this up, even if she thinks I'm not really Canadian anymore.

* * *

**Chapter 4**

The compound feels empty without the whispering voices of the dead. You watch the birds come and pull the eyes from their heads impassively, picking at their weathered skin until they have access to the flesh underneath. Some are now swarming with animals eager for a meal, but others remain untouched. A plague runs about them, and you can almost feel the shudder of the earth as they stare blankly up at the rolling sky. Mercedes asked you, once, how it didn't disgust you, but you shrugged and smiled brightly, looking to her. _There's nothing gross about death. It's just another stage everybody has to go through. _They don't believe you, but you guess that's okay. Some part of you thinks it's for the better.

Time passes, as it must. You don't know how long they've been here now, but it can't be very long - the walls are still bloody, things promised to be fixed left untouched. They've created a barracks for each other where they pile on the floor like sleeping wolves, all crushed into one room. You think it gives them a sense of protection. The one relegated to guard duty often gets the cot, but falls asleep within minutes. You lie alone.

Food is becoming an increasing problem. You, with your skeleton skin and broken body, never ate much, if at all. Twelve teenagers in one place consume an unbelievable amount of cans and boxes, frivolous with their water now that they know there is an unending supply. (But for how long?) The girl with the good hands - Tina, you think - mentions starting a vegetable patch on the roof, but that requires climbing up the stairs long since chained and forgotten. It also means wandering out into the waking world full of stumbling corpses and silent cities, a few living against the endless dead. They all get quiet when it's mentioned, and you can tell they're counting the days until they're forced back outside with nothing between them and a cruel end but a few crude weapons built by their own hands alone. (You've gotten good at reading people, you think. You can tell what they feel, but not what they think, for the brain is a tricky, fickle thing, unwilling to be read and remembered.)

They tell you a week has gone by when they gather around each other again in an ugly, lopsided circle. With people here it's easier to keep track of the minutes that disappear from your grasp like smoke, but you still lose chunks of time to whatever abyss lurks in you. The gaping hole your memory has created stretches outwards, ever changing, ever devouring. Dreaming is fractured at best, and sometimes you yearn for the world you've left behind.

Quinn leans against an old desk, her arms crossed over her chest and a frown on her face. She was a leader, once, always coiled like a predator about to strike. "We've run out of food." She never stalls or sugars the truth, and in an apocalypse there's no place for half-truths. "Or, we're about to, anyway. Whatever Brittany stored up wasn't enough to keep us all going for very long."

"We have enough for a few days." Kurt protests, wringing his hands in front of him. "Maybe we could go upstairs and scrounge to see if there's anything there? I'm pretty sure there's another floor."

They all turn to you - like the basement, the upstairs sends your skin crawling. Luckily, there's no way of accessing the stairway. "I don't have the key." You shrug, fondling the chain. "I've tried all of them, none fit."

A collective sigh rises from the group.

"Are you sure?" He asks desperately.

You look at him silently, holding his gaze until he turns away.

Puck scratches at his head, stubble growing in where his head was once shaved. He looks like a waterlogged squirrel has taken up residence on his scalp. Shadow snorts - you didn't realize you said it aloud. He shoots a scowl at the both of you, but he can never tell which expression marks your guilt. "Great, so... no food, only water. We're running out of meds and stuff too. Wasn't there a pharmacy close to here?"

From the only unboarded window one can see the red cross blinking in the distance from atop a squat, unassuming building, a beacon of hope to an otherwise doomed survivor. The prospect of going out into the world is terrifying and your legs jump with nervous energy as one hand finds its way to your mouth, teeth worrying the already bitten nails.

"There is..." Quinn says slowly, eyeing him, "but who's to say it's not already ransacked?"

He shrugs, hoisting the slung fireaxe higher over his shoulder. There is a restlessness in him different from yours - it is angry rather than afraid, aching to be let out and expended. "And what if it isn't? It's like... a hundred feet away, if that. We're gonna have to go out eventually, and it'll be way easier to test the waters now where we can run back if anything happens."

_Something always happens,_ you want to say, but the boy with the glasses beats you to it.

"While I naturally want to agree with Quinn and avoid any semblance of contact with the zombified world, Puck has a point - this alone would be cause for a parade in our former lives." He gets glared at, subtly high-fived by Mike, and carries on. "We need supplies. Anybody can see that we will run out very soon, and I doubt we'll make it for very long on the streets without adequate necessities or a guide. Which, unfortunately, I doubt Brittany could be."

He mesmerizes you. Your eyes can't leave the picture of his legs, neatly kept in still-pristine slacks, dangling uselessly from where he perches upon a desk. He takes turns riding the backs of the boys, his bony arms slung tight around their necks and his wasted limbs carefully cradled in their huge hands. (Shadow calls him Wheels, but he doesn't seem to have any. Maybe she's lost it too.)

Rachel hops down from her own seat. From here, you notice just how short she really is, and fight your mouth that wants to curl up into a crooked grin.

"I propose we make a plan." She claps her hands together and ignores the groans of protest across the room. "While I'm afraid I don't have my trusty PowerPoint with me to make a presentation, I assure you that I am fully capable of coming up with a working plan that will ensure the relative safety of all of us."

"Relative meaning there's still a chance one of us will get bitten, right?" Tina inquires sweetly, causing Rachel to frown.

"Of course, Tina, there's always a risk venturing out into undead territory. All we can do is be properly prepared and execute our mission swiftly."

Shadow throws her hands up in the air, her brows knit into an exasperated frown. "For fuck's sake people, it's not a top secret military mission. We leave here, go there, kill some zoms and take a bunch of shit, and then come back! What's there to plan?"

Several people murmur their agreement, but you've seen her plotting things under her breath when nobody's looking. There's a tactician lurking deep under that thick skin, secretly taking from the world to alter and shape the future.

"Santana, you should know that-"

"Can it, Gimp." She snaps in boy's direction, glaring at him from his position on the table. "I don't want to hear it."

Mercedes' boyfriend (she told you his name was Sam, and you think it fitting) tries to inch in with his hands raised defensively. "Come on, Santana, you shouldn't call Artie names. We promised to try and get along when all this went down."

"Habits are hard to break, Fish Lips. I can't help it when I'm trapped in one place for so long with so many idiots."

"Besides," Quinn mutters from against the wall, "this is her version of trying. Be happy you're getting this much."

"See!" She exclaims loudly. "Quinn understands me! Snix can't be tamed!"

"Is Snix your friend?" You ask curiously, oblivious of the snickers around you. Rachel looks like she wants to scold them (or maybe you), but loses heart half-way.

Before anybody else can open their mouths, the sole adult of the room steps in. His shirt is rumpled and stained, his tie mangled and torn apart. Whatever state his hair used to be in has now utterly disintegrated into messy and knotted curls. If you look close enough, you swear you see a whole universe hiding within it.

"Guys," he tries, "calm down for a minute. There's no need for us to get hostile."

Some turn to him, some ignore him completely. Shadow rolls her eyes and pulls a nailfile from the pocket of her shirt, Quinn turning to Artie to converse quietly while Puck yawns and slumps back against the wall. Finn watches the man's every move with bright, wide eyes, and the others all lend a reluctant ear. You think he has about as much charisma as a wet blanket, and is maybe half the fun.

"There's obviously no easy solution here," he continues, looking around before spotting you. "Do you have a whiteboard?" He asks hopefully, frowning when you shake your head. "Oh well, I guess we can do without. But Kurt's right, we should look through the top floor first to see what we can find."

"What part of _no key_ don't you understand, Mr. Schue?" Puck asks, perhaps a bit harsher than intended.

"Well, we can always find wire-cutters or-"

"Yeah, which we will probably be able to get _at the pharmacy._"

"Puck, mind your tone." Mr. Schue warns him, though whatever threat he might possess has long since worn off.

The boy seems to realize that, too, running one hand over his overgrown mohawk and his lips curling up into a smirk. "Oh yeah? What are you gonna do, give me detention? We're not in Ohio anymore, and you're really not my teacher. Hell - I could shit on this floor and you couldn't do anything."

"Don't do that." You warn him, but he ignores you in favour of the loud bang that echoes through the halls.

Quinn scowls and retracts her hand, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. "Will all of you just stop it?" She snarls angrily, glaring at them both. "We don't have _time _for this. If we argue over every course of action, we're going to starve to death here and there's nothing that can be done about it. We're going to the pharmacy in a half hour; that's final, end of story. Get ready or do something useful."

When she turns on her heel and stalks away, your body thrums with anticipation of stepping out under the sun once again.

* * *

Moments before stepping out of the now opened door, Mike appears and slaps a pair of sunglasses into your hands.

You look at him quizzically, but mirror the kind smile he sends your way. "I've seen you outside before." He explains, checking the shoulder strap of his large, empty duffel bag. "It's like the sun melts you. Maybe you can actually see properly if you wear those." He's obviously tried to clean the handles and there's only the smallest hints of gore in the creases - a nice gesture. You slide them over your nose and note instantly how the world loses its cutting quality.

"Thanks." You grin brightly, shuffling them back over the bridge of your nose and patting his arm. The muscle under there startles you, so used to stark bone and tight skin covering the skeleton. Your fingers threaten to lose themselves in exploration, but Tina clears her throat from beside you and you draw your hand away as if burned.

"Sorry." You mutter sheepishly, but she waves you off with a smirk.

"He's a very fine specimen." She agrees amicably, ignoring the way his cheeks go red. "But we should probably go before Quinn has a stroke."

The three of you wander down the hallways until you reach the entrance they once ran through, picking up packs along the way. Tina's crowbar is as long as her forearm, and the steel is blunted and tarnished, red sunk into the metal. Mike holds a pistol in his belt, the precious little ammunition remaining stuffed into his pocket. Your hands remain bare, empty of things that harm but equally lacking of those that heal. Quinn paces anxiously by the door.

Some have decided to stay behind. Mercedes remains to mobilize the others into improving the degree of life into something bearable; Rachel, Finn and Artie stay as well. Kurt has vowed to unlock the upstairs and disappears into the haunted basement in search of forgotten keys - the adult (Schuester, you remember) pretends to work while staring distractedly at the bloody walls. It seems impossible to pull such a place into a home worth sharing but you will find a way, a fortress to boast about. The dead will whisper about it in their eternal sleep, watching with their unseeing eyes. Shadow and Puck converse quietly by the entry, their hands flicking back and forth in dance, voices low and rough.

"Are we ready to go?" Quinn asks, eyeing you and your keys. They jingle in your hand as you nod, the sunglasses slipping slightly down your nose. Tina and Mike flank the sides as you carefully unsnap the lock, weapons at the ready - sunlight pours through the hold and even through your lenses you squint as the chains fall away with a horrible clank. Puck rushes out and nearly knocks you off your feet, stopped only by Shadow's steadying hand.

She looks at you for a moment and you hastily look away with your tongue between your teeth, throwing the keys to Mercedes before pulling the doors shut behind you. They refasten with a dull boom, and you are alone in this wasteland world.

"Come on!" Puck says, loudly for such a silent city, brandishing his axe proudly as he strides across the street to the pharmacy. He reminds you of a little boy who finally gets to play, face gleaming with excitement and lips split into a grin. Your hands clench around the tire iron you were gifted (_always need something in a place like this_, Kurt said), the metal cold and unkind in your long hands, weighing heavily upon you. The gash in your arm throbs with anticipation.

Your little group cautiously approaches the decrepit doorways that swing on their hinges, the gleaming red cross now flickering with broken power. Peering into the gloom shows nothing, but you know better than anybody the things that lurk in the pockets where sunlight cannot touch.

(There's no slow breathing, no shuffling steps, no dead heartbeat. It's safe - but they don't know that.)

As you step into the room, the first thing noticed is the shelves that have been stripped of boxes and cans, necessities and supplies. Whatever remains is sparse and of cheap quality - perhaps better than nothing, but disheartening none the less. Quinn turns to all of you. "Sam and Mike, start taking any food that you can see... canned food, crackers, that gross fake tea... it doesn't matter. Anything. If you find band-aids and things too, take those. Things that come in creams tend to be a good choice."

They nod and set off into the aisles, packs slung to their front and moving with slow, deliberate steps.

"Santana, Puck and I will go into the back to look for stuff. We have the best weapons, and the storage has all the places a zombie could be hiding. Britt and Tina, you should look for pills behind the counter. You'll be the only ones that have any idea of what'll be useful."

Everybody sets off to their respective tasks, Tina taking you by the wrist and pulling you along. You grit your teeth as her hand clamps directly over your closing wound but choose to remain silent. Carnage has visited here - there are rotting bodies sprawled over the floor, dark smears of blood spattered over all different directions, merchandise scattered and ruined under the trample of many feet. It becomes little more than background these days. Maybe you used to be bothered by it, long, long ago.

"In here." She whispers, jumping over the counter and waiting for you to scramble after her. People have obviously helped themselves, orange little bottles rolling about underfoot. Some of them are open, some closed - all have complicated names of which you can make no sense. The narcotics section has been ravaged, and nothing remains. "See if you can find anything with the word _oxy_ before it." Tina advises, disappearing around a corner to the rustle of pills. You follow her, head hunched to the ground.

In the distance you can hear the progress of others, things shifting about as they shove glorious provisions into their packs. Your mouth waters at the thought of food that isn't tuna.

Your companion cheers as you proudly hold up a large bottle with _oxycodone_ laid out in black letters on the front. Something in you remembers these, nights spent lying in your little bed, staring hazily at the ceiling with no care or thought to your name. People in white would check on you, tending to you, but your body would move for nobody. A zombie with a beating heart. The way they make you feel reminds you too much of the dark times before these wanderers interrupted the silence of your home, and you quickly stuff it far away.

It's easy to lose yourself in the repetitive task of combing the store. Each thing is carefully checked before either being taken or set aside, and the rattle of your pack fills the moments in between. It's so easy, in fact, that you nearly allow Tina to open a heavy door with somebody on the other side.

Your arm yanks her hastily by the collar and you slap your other hand over her mouth, holding her close to you as she struggles. Her shriek is muffled by your palm but you hear the quiet shuffle regardless, almost indistinguishable alongside the hum of the vents, from the body behind it and the hitch in breathing as it registers another presence. You don't know if you believe them about zombies, not when the idea seems so horribly impossible, but you know the rest of the world is sick. Maybe you're sick too?

"Be quiet," you hiss, "don't you hear him singing?" She goes limp and confused in your arms, straining for the slightest sound. The air rushing through warped vocal chords is fetid, twisted and grating. After a small moment, Tina shakes her head slowly.

You let her go, unwinding carefully, fingers trailing apologetically across her throat.

Tina backs up automatically away from both the door and you. Her eyes are nervous, surely, but suspicious. "Prove it." She whispers, nodding to the door. Your eyebrows furrow. "Show me what's behind the door."

One of your hands carefully hoists the tire iron by your face, reaching out for the knob. You feel the... not curiosity, no. Curiosity demands a human mind, something inquisitive and sentient that reaches for things that are not altogether there. This is the mind of a diseased animal - a thing that forgets itself entirely and drives along with nothing more than a frenzied instinct to survive. You remember what it was like. (Such an awful way to live.)

The door swings open to reveal the person you knew was standing behind. It's a supply closet, a tiny thing, and the wooden interior has been gouged out with broken nails imbedded into the surface. Blood has congealed in a messy pool so deep that it sticks to the soles of its ragged shoes and at one point it must have been lying down, because you see the hand prints progress lower and lower until they hit the floor and disappear. Wires from the ceiling hang down and wrap like sparking snakes over joints and limbs, immobilizing any movement apart form the open gape of its mouth. You see the lungs try to move, but the torn throat produces no sound and you count your small miracles.

Tina's gaze is stunned on the side of your face as you walk up to it, stroking its clammy cheek and smiling slightly as it turns towards you momentarily. "See?" You say happily, turning to look at her for a second. "They aren't mean."

"Britt, no-" Fleshy lips prod your fingers and a moment later you are swathed in cold, thick spittle. Broken teeth nip at your flesh but the sting is more of a papercut, a nuisance. Your nose wrinkles as you yank your hand from its mouth, wiping your slimy fingers on its bloody shirt. "Gross."

Tina's hands are on you in an instant, yanking your wrist out, searching for any lacerations. Her eyebrows knit in confusion when she finds nothing but fragile skin bleached pale white. "How... how did you not get your fingers ripped off?"

You laugh, taking your appendage back. The sound is calmer than it's been in weeks, fuller but softer. The hard edge of insanity pulls back the longer you remain around people who talk in words and thoughts, and you don't know yet if you will mourn the absence.

(But you know that it never goes away, not entirely. Madness is something that lingers in the shadows and forgotten corners of the mind.)

"They like me, I guess. Maybe they know I used to have a sister like them. Oh! Maybe we're related!" You like that idea - family members stumbling around in the big, bad outside, always welcoming. Home can be a person and not a place - what else do you have to ask for if your home is the rest of the world?

She looks at you like she doesn't know whether to shake you or hug you, and instead settles for smiling cautiously and squeezing your hand one last time. Sometimes you think they're too closed off, too guarded to truly appreciate everything going on around them, but you suppose you understand. Living beyond your red walls with things that go bump in the night would make anybody wary.

"Come on, we should find the others." As if summoned, the patter of footsteps sound from directly behind you. You hear their breathing and the thunder of their heartbeats, so loud with the absence of sound. Every moment unsafe brings them louder and louder until it threatens to deafen the world. They are the drums that used to pound inside your skull when fever caught you with its scorching claws and licked its tongue up your atrophied spine, moulding itself until it was a part of you. You don't want to admit it, but sometimes it visits you in the dead of night and you walk the abandoned halls to the whisper of their gentle breathing.

Tina turns to them, her whole being relaxing and unwinding when she spots Mike, safe and sound. They revolve around each other like all good things do, bouncing and colliding soundlessly, together again.

They skid around the corner. "We heard you guys, are you okay?" Puck's feet slide over the floor and you laugh at his wide eyes, the fireaxe flailing about in the air and nearing hitting Sam in the face. He scowls at you, hard and dark, like it would make a difference. Little boys with weapons don't scare you anymore.

"Yeah, we're fine. Britt saved me from a walker."

Mike peers over your shoulder at the figure, now snapping and slobbering soundlessly from his bindings.

"Is that the only one?" He asks curiously, looking around.

She nods. "We think so. I almost ran right into it."

The longer it strains against its restraints the more uncomfortable you become. They stand complacent, content in letting it agonize for something that will be forever out of reach. Its eyes unnerve you, so you go to close the door. Puck's hand stops you.

"What you doin'?" He asks lazily, hefting his weapon over his shoulder.

"Um... closing it?" You're never sure which answer is the right one when you talk to him - every response you can give seems not to satisfy.

"Why?"

"Noah, give her a break." Quinn sighs. "Let's just go."

"Give me a second." He says cheerily, swinging the door back open and pulling his axe back. His weapon is a blur as he brings it down hard with the narrow point facing the person trapped in the wires - there is a snap and a groaning crunch as it buries itself deep into the shadow of the socket, jerking the whole body along with it when Puck quickly retracts, leaving the now immobile corpse to dangle limply like a marionette suddenly missing a puppeteer. Your eyes widen as you slowly touch the side of your face, smearing brain matter into your pale skin.

It seems that you are all the same on the inside; its (his?) innards are identical to the ones your sister wept when Shadow drove a hole through her skull. Your gaze turns blankly to Puck. "Why... why did you do that? He wasn't going to hurt you."

His smile is sharp, entirely cruel along the edges. "All of them have to die. If we don't hunt them down, we'll just become one of them. Do you want to be dead?"

"It wouldn't be that bad." You murmur softly, but he ignores you in favour of snatching his pack from the floor. "Come on." He says, grabbing Sam roughly by his bicep to haul him from the store. The squeak of his bloody shoes haunt you the entire way out.

A gentle hand pulls you aside, and you turn to see Shadow with her lips pursed and a rag in one hand. "Let's get you cleaned up." She says quietly, manipulating your skeleton arms and wiping the innards from your sleeves. Pieces of him fall away into her hands that she then casts carelessly onto the floor. The others retreat to offer you a vague sense of dignity, but you fear you lost that long ago.

"Sorry about Puck." She says gruffly, hesitantly touching your jaw to run the cloth up your swan neck. Her skin is porcelain against yours, and your eyes shut to the world as the soft rasp of the rag swipes up your throat. Shadow's nature is to be uncaring and unkind, but she constantly proves herself a contradiction. "He's the one that was hurt the most by all of this shit."

"What happened?" Her movement stutters and in the hesitation is a lifetime of doubts.

"We, uh, we don't come from around here, if you haven't noticed. Turn." You spiral gracefully on her command, baring the bones of your shoulders to her. "On our way from Ohio, actually. It was supposed to be this huge thing that our school would be so proud of, and it was the first time a lot of us had gone out of state. We all piled up on a school bus and left town one day, another one filled with our family members behind us. It was a long trip. We were the classic high school idiots acting like it was the best time of our lives."

She begins the long and arduous task of picking the grey matter from your light hair, her fingers weaving deftly through the strands. "We were just outside New York when the world started _really_ going to shit. Sure, we'd heard about it on the news, but it was far away, you know? Further south. People going nuts and killing their families, running down strangers on the street, breaking through glass windows with their bare hands. It was all bullshit and we called it like bullshit." Shadow snorts harshly, unapologetic when she tugs harder than meant. "Except it really wasn't, and zoms wait for no asshole. We were stopped by a group of them on the highway. Managed to fight them off, sure, but we got separated from our families and had to run deeper into downtown."

The rag prods at your hairline - her expression she makes is obviously uncomfortable with your unblinking stare, but you're far too enthralled to remember silly things like personal space and body language. "There's a but coming." You state, wincing as she presses particularly hard.

"We stayed long enough to watch Puck's little sister get ripped apart. Just... one second they had her, and then there was this horrible noise like old leather tearing and somebody dropping wet food on the ground. She was screaming but it was impossible to miss it when they got to her spine. You ever hear a storm break a wet branch?"

You flinch at the thought, a phantom sound of crying floating into your ears like a distant memory before it vanishes as quickly as it had appeared. "Is that why he's so mean?"

She nods, pulling the last of the ooze from you. "Yeah. He was always an ass, but he was never really _mean_. Now it's like I don't recognize him."

"You can be mean too, you know." You inform her bluntly, face remaining impassive when she arches an eyebrow at you.

"I know, I'm a bitch." Her hands wipe down on the wall, adjusting the position of the knife strapped to her waist. The observation is forward, but it holds a hint of pride and acceptance both inside it, like she's convinced it's all she'll ever be.

You lean back against the counter. "No, not a bitch. Just mean. It's not nice to call people crazy even if you think they can't hear you."

If you hadn't become so good at watching over these past several weeks, you wouldn't see the hint of guilt flicker over her features. "You heard that?"

"I hear everything."

"Well... you _are _kind of crazy."

"Oh, I know." You say cheerfully, casually inspecting your tire iron in your right hand. "It's all messed up in my head, but it's still not nice to use it like an insult."

She studies you for a second, sighing. "Speaking of your head... sec, you've got another piece..." Her hand reaches for your temple and her fingers worm slightly under the covering of your hair, finding it. Instead, she digs into your hole to the point where her fingernails scratch the bone hidden underneath your fragile skin. Fire blooms behind your right eye and you shriek in the way a dying animal would its last battlecry, leaping away from her as if she was the one to burn you. You hunch down into a little ball, your spine curling from underneath your shirt, blocking out the booming world.

You vaguely hear her inhale in surprise and a moment later her warmth is next to you, attempting to pry your hands from over your temple. She is muscle where you are bone but she has none of the frenzy that you hold. Eventually she settles for worming her hands around your wrists, her fingers digging, searching much in the way she just did.

"What _happened_ to you, Britt?"

You shake your head, refusing to speak lest she coax all the wounded noises from you. Quinn and Mike come scrambling around the corner with their weapons raised high, only to halt in confusion at the two of you on the floor.

"Are you guys okay?"

Shadow goes to open her mouth, but you grab her knee in time to look her in the eye. "Don't tell them."

Her tongue runs over her teeth before she gives a great, heaving sigh, helping you to your feet. It takes effort to look like part of your face wasn't just spasming violently, but you clench your jaw and vacantly smile through the pain. Perhaps the tear tracks give you away, but you won't be the one to say it.

"I scared her." She mutters to them, pushing through their barrier. "Nothing to see here, let's go. I've had enough of this place."

Tina rubs your back and doesn't notice how your smile turns genuine.

* * *

The spoils from your raid may seem meager, but are in all respects impressive. Boxes of instant food and cans of preserved corn, fish and meat tumble out from your packs, along with the distinctive rattle of new medicine. Bandages and gauze are saved and placed on the table of the kitchen that now serves as the main area for meetings, bandaids and polysporin a small blessing for a world that suddenly became too sharp and defined. Bottles of water are stacked and kept hidden away for another time - all of you have a feast, consisting of crackers and a can of your choice.

Despite the hopeful air, there is a tension that has settled over all of you. Even you with your distorted reality sense it, thick and painful, darting between factions that seem to form pseudo-bonds. Sam keeps watching you with a look you can't decipher, and it makes your skin crawl with phantom claws.

All the while you ignore Shadow and her constant scrutiny, the gaze that lingers on your temple cleaned of red.

Rachel breaks the uncomfortable silence as she always does with that constant lack of social rules. In this circumstance, you count it a blessing. "As our first ever raid was a success, I suggest we begin an overhaul of the compound. We've recovered enough cleaning supplies to do a fairly thorough sweep of the main floor. I cannot be the only one that notices the constant odour of rot that comes from almost every room, and I fully believe we need to start using separate rooms for sleeping. I can only go so long with somebody's foot in my back before I lose my patience."

"The dead don't like being erased." You mutter, and she looks at you warily for a moment before overwriting anything you just said. As usual. (Are you one of the dead, too?)

Grumbles of agreement all around, too busy with stuffing their faces to really add in their opinions.

"I believe we should start with the bathrooms and two other rooms. That way, we can split up into reasonable numbers without having to fight terribly over who picks roommates. However, I do think gender oriented rooms would be best-"

Shadow raises her hand for a moment, hastily swallowing her mouthful. "Hold up, midget. Are you forgetting that we've cross-bred so many times here that nobody's actually sure who's slept with who?"

Puck nods sagely. "That's right. 'Sides, I want to shack up with Lopez here so I don't have to move rooms to get laid on the regular, and it would be easier for everybody if they just avoided that hot mess."

"In your wet dreams, Fuckerman." She growls angrily, throwing a spoon at him. "That ship has sailed, and your massive paws are never getting all up on the twins ever again."

"Yeah, you know what else is massive-"

"That is enough!" Rachel shrieks, covering her ears. "Fine, we won't do gendered rooms, but _please_ keep whatever intercourse you have private and away from our ears! We have no protection, and remember that Brittany seems to be able to hear just about anything that goes on around the compound. You would make our host uncomfortable."

"Pretty sure she isn't a host anymore if we're moving in." Mike says, unwittingly spraying the wall with corn before Tina grimaces and slaps his thigh.

Rachel claps her hands, positively ecstatic that people have agreed to her plan. "Very well! We should start right away in hopes of setting up our rooms tonight before dark falls. Grab your cleaning supplies and be on your way." As an example she rises from her chair, grabbing some gloves, a bottle of what you believe to be bleach and windex, and striding determinedly in the direction of the bathrooms. You grimace.

"Is she always so..."

"Obnoxious?" Quinn pipes up, finishing up her meal.

"I was going to say happy, but that works too." You concede, throwing your can into the little trashbin at your feet. "I think I used to be happy before."

She looks at you curiously. "Before what?"

You shrug. "Just... before." You bend down to pick up a bottle of supplies and stifle the groan as your forearm twinges in distaste, the still-broken skin disliking such a heavy load. They've noticed the hand that's slow to close but you always shrug and say it's been there for as long as you can remember - the truth if you've ever told it, and they leave it alone. It heals as the rest of your bodily scars do.

You ignore the fact that the wound in your temple was just beginning to heal and has now split back open into an angry hole. Denial has always been the easiest way to live.

Hearing Rachel's song floating down the halls (she does have a lovely voice, it's true, but she sings constantly and it is starting to wear on your fractured sanity) causes you to make a sharp turn away from the sound, heading instead into one of the rooms marked for use. It has no windows that could be broken into, enough room for multiple people, and desks. This is an important fact as the carpet has long since leeched the death from whatever laid there for ages on end, rotting away and seeping down into the fibers. A quick inspection shows it is a near worthless cause, better ignored if not for Artie's homemade concoction of ammonia he swears will remove anything with patience. It smells like sin and makes you gag, but it's worth a try.

Armed with nothing more than a sponge and some flimsy rubber gloves, you spread it over the whole room, stumbling back out once or twice into relative fresh air for a few precious moments. Eventually the carpet is saturated and on its way to disinfected; spreading the area with towels, you ignore the stinging of your eyes and soak your sponge, getting down on your knees to scrub the walls. Each handprint tells a story you hasten to memorize before it gets erased, painstakingly attempting to remove a life from the drywall. It doesn't work entirely, and there are still echoes even after you run low on solution and the carpet has begun to dry underneath you. Part of you likes it that way - it's like they're still around. The spot where your sister died refuses to clean itself and it feels a little bit like fate.

You're almost done when Tina comes into the room with her shirt over her nose, grabbing you by the bicep. She doesn't say anything as she hauls you out, scattering your supplies, but judging by the red eyes she wouldn't be able to.

Falling into the hallway is a breath of fresh air, and you gasp violently to pull it into your starved lungs. How long have you been holding your breath? You don't remember breathing when everything fell into the tunnel of spray-scrub-spray but surely you must've at one point - the burn in your throat attests to that.

"You're gonna kill yourself one day, girl." Mercedes says as she comes around the corner, staying away from the cloud of chemical one can almost feel actively wafting from the room. "How you didn't notice it was gonna start burning your skin off at any second I don't know."

You shrug, pulling off your pink gloves and casting them aside. Even the walls look brighter, whiter than before. The screams of the dead are mere whipsers in the drywall. "I think I fixed it."

They peer inside, recoiling at the stench.

"It's certainly nicer, if you can get past the burn." Tina admits, touching the wet walls. "I'd totally sleep here once it airs out. I bet even Rachel couldn't get it this clean."

You were expecting to take this room, and your expression must say as much because she laughs. "What, you think we're gonna let you sleep alone? I'm rooming with you!"

Somebody wants to spend time with you? Willingly? You stare at her like one would study an alien, judging her for the truth. "Oh, don't look at me like that. Mercedes wants to be with us too, don't you?"

"For sure. I ain't getting stuck with Puckerman or Finn - boy has gassy baby problems."

"Count me in!" Mike pipes up from where he's materialized, wrapping an arm around Tina's waist. "You've done such a good job, I couldn't help but take advantage of your superior cleaning skills. We'll have the best room in the whole compound."

Mercedes claps, rubbing her hands together. "Good. Now that we've finished with our dibbs, let's go save Rachel from the bathroom before Satan rips off her head and uses it as a rag." The three of them casually pick up their things and make their way towards the influx of curses that storm from the open sprawl of the community showers, and all you can do is hurry along in hopes of catching the show.


	5. Chapter 5

_A/N:_ It's been a while but I decided I wanted to write it so I did. Thank you to my lovely beta, **LeMasquerade, **for everything she has done and continues to do. This chapter is dedicated to **Swinging Cloud**, who hates when authors deviate from their main stories to write something else, which is partly why I did it. Stop being a bitch and maybe I'll write some more Battlesong xoxo

To everybody else, enjoy!

* * *

**Chapter 5**

They do end up sleeping with you, their bodies sprawled over the dry carpet with a thin blanket between them and the still powerful stench of ammonia that comes in bursts. You've developed a constant headache that slowly gnaws away at your reasoning and common sense; Tina says it's from overexposure to the fumes, and it will fade in time. You've taken to going outside into the back courtyard in an attempt to banish the ache. It pulses behind your eyes and sometimes you even lose track of whole conversations, only coming back to yourself when they snap their bony fingers in front of your face. Shadow watches you with this stare that's so terribly concerned in all the ways she tries not to be. She's convinced its partly because of your hole and believes you should ask Tina to look at it. You disagree.

"Why?" You ask her, scrubbing dirt from under your nails. Until you can unlock the upstairs you've taken to making a tiny garden in plastic pots, coaxing little green shoots to life in such a dangerous place. Each and every one of you must always go in pairs to ensure you're not taken by surprise—the pharmacy made sure of that. "It's not like she can help me."

She leans against the next sink, the sharp bone of her hip resting against the porcelain. She's too thin, like you, but the muscle under her skin ripples out when she moves like a panther.

"Maybe she can try." She argues back, crossing her arms. "Stitch it or something so that it's not just a gaping wound."

You sigh and give up on your nails, gripping the sink with both hands and turning to face her. You're confused by her concern, surely, but a part of you likes it. Living so long on your own where you didn't even care about yourself makes it a nice change. "Why do you care?" You challenge her, having long given up on the nuances and subtleties of human interaction. They notice you are blunt, achingly so, and always ask for your opinion on matters that deserve nothing but the truth. "When you first got here you wanted to shoot me or kick me out. You're still mean to everybody else. What's changed?"

Her face pales slightly and she looks away brusquely, but you've already seen the downturn of her lips and the twitch of her eyebrows drawing together. _She doesn't know either_, you realize suddenly.

"I don't care about you," she snaps, too harshly to be natural. "We don't need weak links in the group if we're gonna survive." But you watch her unwaveringly with that inhuman stare of yours, staring and staring until her shoulders hunch and she crumbles under your scrutiny.

"... and you saved Tina. That was pretty cool."

You try to smile but another spike of pain behind your eyes warps it, tilts it off-kilter and makes you stagger momentarily. Your fingers pinch the bridge of your nose, and it's not until a few minutes later that you register her voice and remember you were in the middle of a conversation. Clearing your throat, you cautiously meet her eyes and note the frown sitting twisted upon her brow.

"Sorry. I, uh, my head hurts." It seems like a lame excuse after all she knows, but she simply nods silently and waits for your pain to pass. (Sometimes you think about calling her Santana, but she has not yet earned that title. There are other games to play before she can regain her name.) You rub your temple and catch a glimpse of your face in the mirror, but the stranger that always stares back makes you look away.

"You think she could help?" You ask quietly, tucking your hair behind your ear. Her gaze automatically travels to the glimpse of the hole before she nods, fixing her gaze over your shoulder to the wall.

"Yeah. You said she had... what was it, good hands?"

_Good hands._ Maybe you don't understand the way your mind works anymore, but you know enough to realize that Tina isn't the one you should be wary of. (Not with the way some of them look at you.)

You nod and the pain passes; maybe she _could_ help. Anything is better than this unrelenting agony. "Okay." You mutter, crossing your arms tightly over yourself. "But only my head."

She looks at you curiously and you curse your stupidity. "What else would she be looking at?"

"Nevermind. Let's go." To distract her you grab her wrist and tug her along, through the corridors and into the kitchen that is now the base of operations for the group. Her body stiffens and you feel it travel through her arm, infecting you like a virus until all you can focus on are the muscles under your touch. Once or twice you almost run into a wall. Eventually you spy Tina, talking quietly between herself and Mercedes—you study her intently and decide once and for all you can trust those hands, circled around a steaming mug of herbal tea. Mercedes notices you both, rakes her eyes over the way your hand is still gripping so tightly to Shadow's wrist before getting up with a cocked eyebrow. Shadow wrenches her arm away, and you feel a profound sense of loss before sitting down in a nearby chair.

"We need you to check Brittany out, Asian Number One. Something's up with her head."

Puck, from the distance, coughs something you think is insulting, but you're done being bothered by boys who will never be men.

Tina comes over and once again you find yourself surprised and how much you like the way she speaks—her timid demeanor does little to hide the powerful voice you know lurks in the depths of her lungs (something tells you that you never had anything like that). She straddles the chair in front of you and _asks_ before she puts on a pair of medical gloves she found in your bathroom, and that pulls the second crooked smile from your lips in a week. Small miracles.

"So, what seems to be the problem?" She asks, checking your forehead with the back of her hand, pressing her fingers against your pulse. She frowns and digs in harder, searching for something that seems so hard to find. Eventually she reaches it, nods slowly, counts the times. It's so slow that she barely feels it against her fingertips. Your temperature is normal, at least.

"Her head's been hurting more than usual. Says there's a hole in her mind." Mercedes says for you, privy to the restless nights rolling about on the floor, pretending not to watch Shadow watch you. Her gaze is the one that makes you shift in your seat, the intensity of it from across the room smothering.

"A hole, hm? Where'd it come from?"

Your shrug tries to be nonchalant, but they see the beginning of upset along the ridges of your shoulders. "It was there when I woke up."

"Okay, let me take a look." Her hands part the curtain of your locks, trace the short, coarse hairs still growing back. When her fingers brush across the wound she squints like she can't quite believe herself, using both palms to smooth away your hair and expose it to the open air. You wince as it tugs upon your broken flesh. "Oh my god... is that... what _is _that?"

Her thumb traces over the imperfection carefully, getting up to peer into it. Tina flails impatiently for a flashlight and shines it in, only to recoil after she does. "I... I can see her brain." She turns to you, then, face ashen. "How did you survive that?"

You smile sadly, your eyes bitter. "Sometimes I don't think I did."

They all begin to gather around but Tina wards them off, sensing the knotting of your wasted muscles. "Hold up." She says at once, getting impossibly closer to you. "I think there's something in there."

At this the chatter starts, thousands of miles a second, but you stiffen abruptly and do the best you can to turn to her. "There's a thing in my head?" You whisper hoarsely, eyes so wide the eyelids almost threaten to peel back. Your body begins to shake and you remember the cloudy dreams of somebody messing with your insides, shifting your organs around and sticking their sterile hands into the very depths of you. You try to raise your fingers to your temple but Shadow has somehow materialized from thin air and pins them to the arm of the chair, only making you strain harder in panic.

"You need to take it out." Mercedes insists, caught in a battle of wills with Tina. "Who knows what's gonna happen if you leave it in there."

"If I leave it in there? What happens if I take it out?" Tina retorts, gesturing to you. "This isn't something in the leg that I can do a few little cuts and then bandage up, 'Cedes. This is her _brain_. Do you know what would happen if something went wrong?"

"Not much else." Puck says from his corner, but the withering glare received by all other occupants in the room shuts him up. You're too busy writhing in your seat to pay much attention, fighting as hard as you can against Shadow's iron grip. Mike has come over to help pin you down and there's too many hands on you at once, too much unknown, too much noise and it's not stopping and you hear their heartbeats and it's all so _loud_—

They're so caught in their arguing that your screaming startles them, Mercedes clutching at her breast and Tina almost dropping the little flashlight she was waving around in the air. You feel possessed, a trapped and cornered animal, thrashing from side to side with your face turning red from the strain.

"Take it out!" You think you're saying but you're not sure; it's inhuman the way your voice cracks and grates and some of the newcomers flinch back. The edges of your nails split and bleed from how hard you're clamping onto the chair arms, every tendon in your neck popping from under your skin. They're saying things and holding you down and you _scream _and _scream_ until you forget your own name. All you know is that you feel whatever it is inside your head and you need it out _now_, even if it's going to hurt so much that you think you're dying all over again.

Tina's face swims into your vision and you realize you're crying, sobbing, begging with her to do it. She calmly holds your face in her hands and says okay despite the shaking of her fingers against your cheeks and you nearly retch in relief, letting out a broken gasp of air.

"You gotta be still, okay?" She says, tweezers miraculously appearing in her hand from where Mercedes found a pair in the drawer. "I'm not gonna do it unless you're still."

You take what she says seriously and stop, Mike almost pitching forward without your resistance. Your lungs take a deep breath and hold it, chest stilling, feeling the cold metal pressing upon your scalp. The first prod is gentle, probing, and you grit your teeth as she forages deeper into the wound, wiggling the tweezers past the jagged bone that gapes open like a mismatched mouth. A deep throb starts up inside your head and their breathing is so loud and intrusive that you screw your eyes shut; Mike is whispering at you to breathe but you don't _want _to breathe, all you'll smell is their sweat and skin and all the things that are too sharp and sincere like this. You whimper as Tina finds the object and the clang of metal on metal echoes in your head.

Shadow's saying something, and you latch onto the sound of her voice like a greedy newborn aching for the comfort of their mother, falling into the rough rise and fall of her tone as Tina begins to pull the object out. It doesn't hurt until she passes through the entrance where it jams and doesn't budge, the broken pieces blocking her exit. She bites her lip and ducks her head to look at you. "I'm gonna pull, okay?"

If you were breathing it would hitch; Mercedes wipes under your eyes with a little cloth and you try to fight through the searing pain in your skull. You think you've cracked a tooth.

Tina anchors her other hand against your shoulder, steadying herself. Santana and Mike lean their full weight against you and they are smothering, their body heat scalding in a way that temporarily distracts you from the metal emerging from your head. All of a sudden Tina gives a mighty yank of her arm and it scrapes half way through your wound before getting stuck.

You scream.

Vaguely somebody's saying _almost there, Britt_ and _you can do it_ but it's a tunnel of pulling and wiggling and bleeding and screaming until with a chilling scrape it's pulled free from you and your mind is blessedly empty.

You don't even have time to register she's holding a little copper bullet with a horrified expression before the pain lances behind your eyes, so sharp and hot that everything falls away and you're left with nothing at all.

* * *

_"Tell me again, Brittany." The man in the white asks and you sigh, cradling your head petulantly in your hands. Everything is scalding and bright and loud and you just want to go back to bed, to be given the clear liquid through the tube in your arm and sleep for a long time. _

_ "I don't want to." You say grumpily, flinching as the needle retracts with another vial of your red, red blood in its chamber. You've lost track of how much they've taken over these past couple days. _

_ The man sighs and shuffles his clipboard, bouncing it upon his knee. "Brittany, don't be stubborn. It's just a few memories." _

_ "I said I don't want to!" You yell, throwing the plastic cup of water at him so that it soaks through his little doctor coat. He blinks for a moment before wiping the spray off his glasses, murmuring to the nurse that watches you with a wary expression. _

_ "Easily agitated and refuses to co-operate." He says in a slow, steady voice, and her hand loops around and around as she writes down what he says; you are captivated by the smooth flow of her letters and watch it without a sound. The world only comes back after he calls you and you look at the clock—seven minutes have passed. _

_ "Why did you do that, Brittany?" He asks you in that same voice and you deflate, shrugging at the wall. To be honest you don't know much of anything recently, except that Christmas just passed and you were stuck here without your friends or family to spend the holiday. Even Jake hasn't come back yet and you find yourself missing his voice. _

_ "I don't know." You mumble, crossing your arms over your chest. Antonio said you look like a junkie, all those needle marks in the soft crooks of your elbows making them inflamed and red. They don't hurt. Not really. "I get mad a lot now. I don't like it." _

_ He pauses, studying you intensely before continuing. "When did this start?"_

_ "I dunno, a few weeks ago?" You catch the small furrow of his brow before he murmurs __again to the nurse, but everything flares so loudly for a moment that you miss what he says. You just want to go home. _

* * *

"... is she—"

"I think I—"

"—there's her pulse!"

"Oh thank God, I thought—"

"Britt, can you hear us?"

Air rattles through your throat and the noises stop momentarily as you moan in pain, trying to roll onto your side and failing. Everything is so hot; you feel bathed in sweat, that feral fever making its reappearance for all of them to see. Your eyes open slightly but they're no more than blurs on a bright canvas so you squeeze them shut again and try to remember where you are.

"Dude, she looks fucked up."

"Let me take a bullet out of your head and then see how you feel."

"What if she dies?"

"She isn't going to die, Rachel."

"I dunno, she looks sick."

A rough hand grabs you by the shoulder and you groan, weakly trying to roll yourself back onto the cool floor where you have some modicum of relief. His skin grates upon yours and the dryness is excruciating. You'd panic if you weren't so tired.

"Leave her alone, Fuckerman. She always looks sick."

A softer hand pries the other one off you and you fall limply to the ground, spreading out your limbs in an attempt to absorb the temperature of the tile. More hands, so many hands, one lifting your chin and another pressing to your forehead and a third smoothing back your hair. Somebody's holding a cloth to your temple, stained red and dripping all over your scalp.

"I don't feel a fever."

"Maybe it's all in her head?"

"You're hilarious."

"Can we feed her some aspirin or something?"

"Somehow, I really don't think something wimpy like that is going to help."

Strong arms pick you up and you recognize Mike's distinct scent as he cradles you to his chest. "I think we should put her to bed." He says and there are various murmurs of agreement as you travel through the compound, one arm limply hanging towards the ground and the other curled close to your body He lays you down upon the desk and pushes a pillow under your head, crouching down and using his thumb to lift your eyelid so you're forced to look at him. He searches for something for a moment inside of your gaze and sighs when you evidently lack what he wants, rustling in his pocket.

"Open up." He whispers, pressing a little pill to your mouth. "I think you need this more than any of us." You swallow weakly and it sticks hard in your throat until he helps you take a drink, the chalky coating leaving a bitter taste in your mouth on the way down.

Not long after he leaves you feel that familiar feeling of floating invade your limbs that you remember despite not possessing the memory to make it click. You sigh in relief and let it bring you back to a world that's slowly, over the course of weeks, beginning to take tangible shape. (If only it could tell you what you left behind.)

* * *

_"You're leaving again."_

_ "I'm sorry. Work needs me."_

_ "Where are you going this time?" _

_ "New York. I should be gone for a few months."_

_ "... are you going to stay there?"_

_ "No, of course not. I'm always going to come back to this family." _

_ "..."_

_ "Why are you looking at me like that?"_

_ "You want to ask me something."_

_ "I don't—"_

_ "You do."_

_ "Come with me."_

_ "W-what?"_

_ "Come help me. You said you want to help people when you get older, right? Now's your chance. It'll be life changing for the whole world."_

_ "But school—" _

_ "You could save lives. I'm sure they'd understand." _

_ "I could do that? Me?"_

_ "You'd be a hero, Britt."_

_ "I don't care about that, I just want to help. But... mom and S—" _

_ "I could talk to them. It would only be for a few months and then we could come home again, together."_

_ "Are you sure?"_

_ "You're the perfect specimen, baby girl." _

* * *

You bolt upright with a gasp, as if underwater, disoriented for a moment by the utter darkness in the room. Your hands smooth over every inch of yourself; your prisoned ribs and your swan neck and your sharp jaws, fingers brushing over the sides of your head and feeling bumpy stitches upon your temple where there was once only a hole. Tina's expression before you passed out comes back to you and you would feel guilty if you could, but you think you lost that emotion a long time ago.

Your three roommates are sprawled over the floor in various stages of disarray—Mercedes hogs the blanket while Mike and Tina curl together, winding their limbs until they are one connected being. They look vaguely like a monster, if all you can see is that long shock of black hair covering both their features.

Elsewhere in the compound your steps echo as you inch your way out the door, taking care not to step on any toes. Every part of you aches, right down to your fingertips, but you feel strangely _good_—free of a burden you didn't know you had. Your head feels lighter somehow and you try a smile, noting how it stretches less awkwardly over your mouth. (Small victories.)

But despite that, there is the hunger. Your head still hurts, but for once it is overwritten by the aching gnawing in your belly, reaching up with greedy fingers and trapping every part of you in its want. One of your arms circles your stomach and you jog (really it's more of a stagger) to the kitchen where your eyes glance over your little stash of food. Meal time must have passed, for it seems smaller than you remember, a few precious cans glinting in the tiny bit of moonlight that leaks through the boarded windows and spills out onto the tiled floor like the blood of a mythical beast. You debate taking some to satiate your ache, but some part of you knows that it won't go away, not like that. You need something _else_.

Maybe that's the reason you find your keys and walk towards the courtyard. Inside, you know it's not a great decision; over and over again they've drilled into your head to never go outside alone despite the sick people never seeming to pay you much mind. _It's dangerous,_ they said, _it'll kill you_. But you're tired of letting everybody other than you decide what's good or bad, so you shove the key into the heavy lock, letting it slip away soundlessly, catching it in your fist before you drop it.

But what happens if one of the sick people find their way into the compound when the others are sleeping? You bite your lip. Maybe they like you but they most certainly don't like them—you know the feeling, the hands that reach to curl around their hearts and still the constant beat that drives you crazy at times, too. So you take your chances and pull it shut, hearing the internal lock click by itself and essentially closing you out from the inside world. Oh well, you're sure you can get in from some other direction.

Outside is nice, and you're relearning what the night air feels like on your skin. It brings with it the faint scent of rot, but you're so used to it that it doesn't bother you, stepping over the bodies that putrefy in rows upon the concrete, wandering out into the street. A straggler or two shuffles mindlessly over the cracked and broken roads, not at all mindful of the way their feet catch into potholes and they fall on their faces, teeth scattering over the ground. You look around at the derelict buildings and wonder where you should go first.

Signs of raiding are still evident in the broken windows and burnt out husks—you don't bother to go in those buildings, knowing you'll find little of use. Maybe they'll be less angry at you for sneaking out if you bring them back something they need. Food, medicine. You suddenly wish you brought a backpack.

As the buildings get more clumped together and the devastation grows in volume, you start to wonder if they're telling the truth. There's a man lying on the ground next to you... well, you can't really call him a man anymore. All that's left is a torso and the shattered spine that sticks from the meat of his flesh, scraping along the ground whenever he drags himself forward. He ignores you as you walk by, the wheezing sounds of his breath altered by the way his right lung trails behind him as he crawls. Would something like this really happen if it wasn't... what they said it was? People can't survive things like that. You don't hear his heart beating in his chest and wonder why sometimes you can't hear yours, either. Maybe your thoughts drown out the sound.

You halt yourself next to a camping store, eyeing the bright sign that still clearly spells _Way of Life_ despite the few bullet holes that blasted out part of the F. They sell survival stuff in here, right? This is what you need if you're going to make it through this nightmare city. You cautiously enter the store, eyes casting from side to side, alert for any signs of trouble. A few rattling lungs but no hearts. It seems safe enough.

People have gone through here and looted until barely anything remains, but a lot of them didn't make it back out alive. You pull a nice looking backpack, black and blue, from the corpse of a woman whose leg looks like somebody mauled it with a lawnmower. A clean shot to the back of the head reveals her exact fate—her body murmurs to you as you gingerly worm her arms out through the straps, lungs letting out an unanticipated sigh as you lay her back down. She could be thanking you, it's a pretty heavy burden.

Peering into the sack, she'd managed to get a pair of sturdy hiking boots, a compass, and a weird little filter thing that looks terribly fragile to be in a survival store. You turn it over in your hands a few times before returning it to the bag carefully—you tend to break things. Maybe Artie can tell you what it does.

Deciding to begin with the bodies, you murmur apologies to them as you delve your hands into their pockets and zippers, pulling out as many useless personal trinkets as you do actual items. Some of these are pictures, echoes of a better life—you talk to them about it sometimes, smooth your thumb fondly over the face of an adorable little child, ask their name. These things are always returned to their proper places after you're done your investigation. You don't find much, maybe a few pieces of weather resistant clothing and some iodine tablets. One man, however, had a scary looking respirator with a whole plethora of straps and buckles slung over the back that you hasten to stuff into your own pack, wondering if it'll stop your head from hurting next time you clean.

The things left here are the useless stuff that people would have gladly carried away in a former life. Kayaks, snowshoes, expensive but ultimately pointless spandex gear. You rub the fabric between your fingers, captivated by how it feels, and even more so by the entertaining notion of how good it would look on somebody you know.

A quiet groan of pain pulls you from your thoughts. You glance through the ruined store, scanning the shelves for the culprit, but all the sick people stagger around as usual with no change in temperament. You're about to shrug it off as your (increasingly wild) imagination before it happens again, louder and achingly real. It piques your interest enough that you follow it carefully, not daring to breathe lest you lose the noise.

When you round the corner to the back of the room you smell it. Fresh blood.

The scent is so different, so distinct, that you nearly take off into a run, only reigning yourself in when your excitement covers the sound. It's when you're nearly on top of him do you pick up the flutteringly weak thud of his dying heart, barely pulsing where it pushes out its precious charge onto the cold floor. You halt and stare down at the body that you realize is a man. A once handsome man in his mid twenties with a ragged beard and piercing blue eyes.

He looks up at you, resigned to his fate, but his breath hitches when he sees the curiosity on your features. "You... you're not... one of t-t-them." He gasps out, the wheeze of his punctured lung making him struggle for breath.

"No." You say flatly though it sounds distinctly like a lie. You bend down to a crouch so you can see him better, looking over the wound hidden by his ripped shirt. A clean, long cut, peppered with little deeper ones. One of them didn't do this...

"H-help... me." He begs, his hand latching around your ankle. The heat of his skin startles you and makes you flinch back, snarling as if a wounded animal and drawing into yourself. He poses no threat, but is a _stranger_, somebody without good hands that tries to touch your flesh.

This wound is permanent. The smell of death has already begun to creep upon him, cloaking him like a shroud, slurring into his words. There is nothing you could do (would do) to help him now, and he must see it in your expression—tears spring to his eyes and he chokes down a sob, reaching for you again though you have shuffled from him.

"P-please, I-I don't... wanna d-d-die!" He whimpers, another spurt of blood pumping from his wounds. Some part of you must take pity on him, surely, for you lean so close to his face that you can smell his sweet, iron breath, face blank.

"It's okay." You say, reaching over and covering his mouth with one of your hands. "It won't hurt." Almost in a trance you pinch his nose with your other hand, squeezing hard and fighting for control as he thrashes weakly upon the floor. Once or twice you see the dull glint of bone from under the layers of his flesh and it makes that ache in you grumble in feral anticipation, knowing something your mind evidently does not. His body eventually goes still, twitching once or twice before deflating with a solid huff of air.

You know death is messy, but you crinkle your nose as the distinct scent of piss lingers in the room. The blood doesn't bother you, nor does the thick slobber he's smeared all over your palm, but somehow this taints the moment. You wipe your wet hands on his shirt, mumbling a quiet _sorry_ when it leaves a stain. He doesn't mind.

Part of you wants to get up, to move on before the first light of dawn breaks through the city, but a greater portion of you is entranced by the way the dim lights of the overhead bulb flicker on his wound and makes it glow ruby red, just like you as you bled and bled and bled today. You reach out and dip your fingers in the great cleave, smearing it all over your fingers, bringing it to your lips to taste. It is coppery and tangy in a way that you can't explain but the ache inside you quivers in delight so you stuff your fingers into your mouth, laving your own tongue greedily over your fingernails to suck up every last bit. All too soon it is gone and you're left with nothing but the distinct want for _more._

Without thinking you get down on your hands and knees, your tongue licking a long stripe up the length of his weeping wound. His cleaved flesh is still hot on your tongue, the skin salty and damp, and a wave of chills lance up your spine to your neck as you force yourself in deeper, spreading his side for better access. Your tongue touches bone so you retract, moving outwards to the meat over his ribs.

Your teeth anchor before you think about it with any rationality of a human being and you're pulling, gnawing on the tough flesh, using your hands to push back so that your jaw can clamp on properly and rend. It separates from him with the sound of tearing wet cardboard, its warmth invading your mouth, chewing desperately past fat and cartilage until your stomach receives its first bite.

What seems like moments after your belly is full and satiated, your face and hands covered in blood. It has dripped down onto your shirt and speckled upon your ill-fitting jeans, slimy and warm to the touch. You sit on your haunches and stare wordlessly at the gaping hole in his side; almost black flesh in some places contrasting with the nubile-white gleam of his bone, marks from _your_ teeth creating ragged holes into his body. The sickly gleam of his organs can be seen now, poking out through the weakened wall of his muscle, bloated and wrong with the strain. His essence sits heavily in your chest, taunting your gorge.

You retch.

Well, you try to. You heave and heave and make wet, choking sounds but nothing comes out. Your body has clamped onto the first bit of true sustenance you've had in weeks (months?) and refuses to let it go no matter how much your mind screams at you now that you have given it back its rightful place upon its broken throne. You even stick your fingers down your throat, but they just taste of blood, and nothing happens—it all reminds you of him—and it _hurts_ in your head, all this thinking and hating and guilting. (You thought you lost that feeling. You don't want it back.)

After a while you drag yourself up from the floor, holding your hands out in front of yourself like they are some diseased animal, seeking running water. You find it in the dingy little bathroom where a woman stands facing the wall, making wounded little noises and mindlessly scratching at the plaster. You ignore her and desperately scrub at the red that has sunk into your skin, pumping all the soap in the world until the tile is a mess of pink bubbles, doing the best you can to pick it from under your fingernails. Then you dunk your head under the scalding spray, filling your mouth with soap in an effort to wipe away the taste of him. Little shreds of his skin are still stuck in your teeth and you dig out the knife you found earlier to get them out.

In the end, you find a better fitting pair of pants—black, cargo, with so many pockets you don't know what to do with yourself—and a long sleeved shirt with a simple tank underneath it. Your arm has healed enough that you don't need endless acres of bandage anymore, just a few winds around that don't show under the sleeves. It still hangs awkwardly from you in places, but at least it doesn't drown you. Your bare feet are now covered by a brightly colored pair of running shoes, tightly laced and comforting. Looking at them makes you feel good, normal. Free of the invisible blood you bear.

Dawn has broken, for you spent more time on that floor than you thought, and you hesitate only a moment before pulling a bike from the racks and breaking the clamps that wind through the spokes with a heavy weight. It's too late to try and get back on foot—since some of them wake with the sun, they'll have known you've been gone for ages. Less time gone means less panic. (The fact they worry at all is nice.)

You sling your heavier backpack onto your shoulders—the lighter one you picked up along the way hangs from your front. It's awkward, maybe, but as you start those first wobbly feet through the store, you know it's the best thing that's happened to you in a while.

The wind whips through your hair and produces the first genuine grin that you can remember, standing up from your seat and using your wasted muscles to propel you further through the streets. It burns in a good way, a healthy way, something you can be proud of as you weave past the dead bodies and potholes that litter your new existence. In the reflection of the little bell attached to your bicycle you can see that a healthier flush has returned to your cheeks, your eyes appearing brighter than they were a few hours ago. You know exactly why that is but steadfastly ignore it, instead peddling faster and faster until all you can focus on is the brutal thump of your heart, leaping through your ribcage and out into the open air.

You screech to a halt by the compound, almost tipping over as your wheels bite into the ground and send you skidding for a few feet. On the outside it seems unassuming, just another grey building in a sea of similar looking complexes, but you know it hides secrets from you. Sometimes you will suddenly remember doing an action before in another life, whether it be brushing your teeth or sweeping the floor or simply staring at the ceiling. The nuances of the reason are still hidden to you, and you're not sure you ever want to know.

Leaning your bike up against the wall, you quietly push on the door that you left through, cursing when you remember you locked it. All the windows are boarded up on the bottom floor and the noise will draw the sick, while the top windows are much too far out of your reach. Maybe if you were feeling a bit more daring you could try and crawl into one of those open ones at the very top, but there's no way up save for a broken drain that's so rusted it seems to be hanging on despite gravity saying otherwise. You decide to risk your life another day, instead resigning yourself to knocking on the front door.

The first time you do, nothing happens. You sigh and tap louder, glancing around suspiciously for any signs of movement. No breathing. Now you pound on the door, nearly leaping back when the frame rattles and you hear a hissed _Brittany? _come from the other side. As soon as you affirm the clinking lock is thrown to the ground and you're yanked inside, coming face to face with Mercedes, her expression so furious you think she'll combust.

"Brittany S. Pierce!" She yells at you, no longer caring about being quiet now that you are firmly inside and Sam has relocked the door. "What in God's name do you think you were doing? We've been worried sick about you!"

Ghosts appear out of the woodwork, their eyes peering accusingly at you, and you shrink a little in your spot.

"I'm sorry, I needed to go out."

"You coulda looked out a window or something!"

"All the windows are boarded—"

"Not the point." She snaps angrily, prodding your shoulder with one outstretched finger. You resist the urge to flinch. "Especially after passin' out on us, too! What were you thinking?"

Your mouth works soundlessly for a moment before you find your voice."I needed to go outside but the door closed on me so I started walking and it was really nice, and then I found this cool store and it had a lot of stuff in it that I wanted so I took it, and then I biked back. And there was a guy, too. I hurt him." She obviously didn't want your literal thoughts because her face remains unimpressed, so instead you pout sadly and mumble out another response. "I wasn't thinking?" you ask, more as a question than an answer.

"Damn right you weren't!" Mercedes takes you firmly by the shoulders, leaning in so close you can see the veins in her eyes. You hold your breath to erase the tangy scent of blood. "Never do that again, you hear?"

She seems mildly appeased by your nod, too nervous to do anything else. (You don't want to tell her you probably will, again and again, so you stay quiet and feel comforted by her concern.)

"Now," she rubs her hands together, staring at your backpack, "what did you bring home?"

You shrug off the front bag and both her and Sam descend on it, yanking out energy bars and leg pouches and rolls upon rolls of duct tape. Sam takes an energy bar and stuffs the entire thing in his mouth in one go, earning irate shouts from the others who have come out to see your spoils. Your boots are handed off to Rachel with a stern "mine" when she hugs them close to her chest, and you gingerly take out the strange looking filter and hand it over to Artie.

"Do you know what this does?" You ask him, walking over to where he's perched upon the desk at the front. He takes it carefully from you, turning it over and over in his hands, bringing it close to his face to read the fine print before his face lights up in a boyish smile. "You found a water filter!"

At your blank stare, he elaborates. "It purifies the water we drink." He says excitedly, bouncing in his seat the best he can. "It might not matter right now, but when we have to start finding our own or this water gets tainted, it might literally be the difference between life or death. You found a good one, too! Mike! Bring me to the workbench!"

Mike appears, shooting you a smile, and bends down, allowing Artie to sling his bony arms over his neck. They disappear down the stairs together, Artie dwarfed by Mike's broad shoulders.

Shadow materializes beside you, watching the others bicker over your spoils. "You said you found a bike?" She asks curiously; though her eyes are elsewhere, the rest of her body is tuned to you in the tilt of her head and the slant of her bones. You're not used to somebody paying so much attention and try to mimic her stance.

"It makes going anywhere a lot faster." You affirm, already missing the feeling of air flowing across your skin. "Dawn came really fast."

"Well yeah." She says, munching on an energy bar thrown to her in the chaos. "You were out for two days and woke up in the middle of the night."

You turn to her in alarm, jaw dropping slightly. "Two days?"

Shadow hums in confirmation. "Tina was beside herself. Thought she'd killed you. I said you were too fucking stubborn to die like that, and look at that, I'm right again. Fuckerman owes me a massage."

You're not entirely sure how to feel that they're taking bets on the stability of your heart, but you shrug it off anyway. Seeing them so happy for a change is nice, despite that primal instinct within you that snarls as they touch _your _things.

"I dunno how you do it, blondie, but keep doing it." Shadow continues. "We might actually survive this fucking nightmare if we keep getting hauls like this." She's found the survival pack that you crammed between the waistband of your cargo pants, and as her fingers brush the small of your back your whole body shudders, a small squeak escaping your mouth as her fingernails accidentally trail over your spine. She looks closely at you, studying the deep flush of your cheeks as you try to regain composure.

"You hungry? It's been a long time since you woke up."

You bite your lip, managing an ironic little smile that you somehow turn genuine. "I already ate."


	6. Chapter 6

A/N: Your enthusiastic responses must really have motivated me, because here's another chapter in record time! As usual, I thank my amazing beta, **LeMasquerade**, for everything she's done. (She must think I'm nuts sending her another chapter within a week.) This chapter, as the last one, is dedicated to **Swinging Cloud**, who is still being a raging bitch. This one's for you~

* * *

**Chapter 6**

**7 days since last feed**

Today is fix-up day.

The rest of the compound had complained bitterly when Rachel said that work needed to be done, but in the boredom that comes with the apocalypse, things have begun to slide. Trash litters the corners of the rooms, dirty clothing is strewn across the benches in the showers, and half-done projects (mostly of Artie's doing) are scattered in various rooms across the space. From now on, all Sundays are Fix-Up Days—they're so important, in fact, that she has marked them down upon some calendar that she managed to scrounge up. None of you could really remember what day it was, so you picked a random Sunday in July and stuck with it. You think it's right.

Shadow is making gleeful use of the respirator you brought home days ago, strapping it onto her face tightly and taking great joy in the way her strange, robotic breathing makes Finn jump ten feet in the air when strategically placed by his ear. You've been seeing her creep around the compound all day, slinking up to his side and roaring with laughter as he drops whatever he's been doing. Quinn eventually pulls her away with a smirk and gets her to work with the ammonia that almost killed you some time ago.

You, on the other hand, are stuck with Kurt, rummaging around in the dark basement for a key to unlock the upstairs. The cutters you'd found earlier had been of no use; Puck had strained and strained at the handles until he'd nearly popped his shoulder, but the large shears had refused to go through. Whoever had locked up the place did so with the intention of keeping it that way.

You'd be content with working in silence; Kurt, not so much. You appreciate that he wants to know you better, but the world has once again taken on that sharp quality, hanging on the edge of a honed knife, and every loud noise breaks your waning concentration.

(It's been a week since you've gone out. A week since you ate that man. The hunger is returning—with it your irritation, your paranoia, your madness. You fear for what you will do now that you know what it is you seek.)

"So, you just woke up here one day?" He asks, shifting through piles of debris accumulated in a former life. Junk from what looks like some sort of lab has ended up here, impressive looking microscopes and tools and things of which you don't know the name gleaming but useless to all of you.

"Yeah," you affirm, wiping your brow. Going through all this metal to find something that might not even be there is an arduous task. Your eyes, fully adjusted to the darkness, narrow as you scan through everything left.

Kurt gingerly picks up a nasty looking examination tool, placing it on the workbench that Artie has claimed and wishes to be brought upstairs. "That's pretty scary. Did you remember anything?"

"I still don't." You mutter, overwritten by his loud exclamation of, "Oh my god, is that blood on this thing?" You flinch at the sound, ears ringing, but walk over to him regardless.

A quick scan reveals he's correct. "Yup. That's normal." You pick it up and turn it around with your fingers. Saturated. (You have to resist the urge to lick.)

He slaps it out of your hands before you can blink, and you turn to him with a blank expression that seems to be vaguely menacing because he backpedals. "There could be diseases on that thing," he explains with a crinkled nose. "Who knows what used to live here before we moved in."

_I did_, you want to say, but he'll only have more questions than you do answers. (Humanity is so tiring sometimes.)

So instead you return to your scavenging, tying a rogue bandana you found across your forehead to push errant strands of hair from your face. "Have you ever been to the morgue?" You ask instead, kicking aside a rusted hunk of metal that screams as it slides across the ground.

"No, why?" He asks curiously, his too-big shirt hanging from his lean frame. _He even sweats prettily,_ you muse thoughtfully, unaware of your staring until he waves his hands in front of your eyes. "Earth to Britt? You were saying something about the morgue."

"Oh, um..." Flashes of cold metal and needles and brown liquid. "There's a lot more blood there. I haven't gone to see it since Finn shot the man." You sigh at the endless task in front of you, adding as an afterthought, "That's where I woke up."

Kurt stops what he's doing abruptly, staring at you as if you'd told him about the eating. (Did you? Sometimes you don't hear what comes out of your mouth and it makes others uncomfortable.) "You woke up in the _morgue?_" He demands, tone disbelieving.

"Yeah," you say, not recognizing his tone. "That's where dead people go, right?"

"Britt, sweetie." He touches your forearm and you jerk away abruptly, stumbling back a few paces and holding it close to your chest. "Oh, is that your bad arm? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you," he apologizes, but how can you explain it's _not about that_, it's about the touching and good hands and people who aren't Tina or Mercedes (or Shadow).

"You're using that voice again," you accuse him, watching his (still) perfectly plucked eyebrows raise to his hairline.

"Which voice?" He asks, and you open your mouth a few times, jaw working soundlessly in frustration.

"The... the one!" You exclaim, nearly stomping your foot when no recognition dawns on his features. "The one that Puck always uses, like he's saying something I should know a-and you think I'm stupid! All of you do!"

"No, Britt—" But you pay him no mind, flinging your arms out so that they almost smack him in the face.

"You do! You're just like them!"

Your fists curl so hard your muscles strain and something warm slides through your fingers; you'd forgotten you'd picked up a piece of metal and now its sharp, ragged edge has sliced its way through the meat of your palm, red, red blood pouring from the gash and dripping onto the floor. It reminds you in a way of the man last week, but it smells wrong—tainted, almost. Its sweet smell covered by another presence that renders it worthless.

Kurt gasps quietly and you look at your hand, glistening now, dripping down to your knuckles and splattering to the floor. How did you not notice that? Maybe you _are_ what they say...

"_Stupid_," you mutter over and over again, clenching harder and forcing it deeper, "_stupid, stupid, stupid_."

(There's a male voice that comes to you in memory, tells you never to use that word when talking about yourself, but you don't trust it. Not now.)

"Tina!" He calls, eyeing you warily. "'Cedes! Anybody!"

It's Shadow that saves the day.

A hand clamps firmly around your wrist and the strength in it stops your assault, brings sense back to your mind. You sway bonelessly on the spot for a moment, blinking, turning your face to her where she watches you with those abyssal eyes of hers. (Eyes that hide secrets. They match yours.)

"Not here." She says firmly, using her other hand to draw you in by the hip, her fingers finding purchase on the groove of your pelvis like an artisan making a statue out of clay. You follow her manipulation as she wants you to, drawing you carefully up the stairs as if you will shatter at any moment. She throws a glance to Kurt that you can't decipher but you are soon out of the basement and away from him. Instantly, your madness fades.

"I'm not angry," you mumble under your breath, seeing the confused glance she sends your way.

"I never said you were," Shadow replies, drawing you into the bathrooms. She spies Rachel cleaning one of the sinks and unceremoniously snatches her by the collar, tugging her back and nearly sending her to the floor. "Out, dwarf," she dismisses, drawing you and your bloody hand closer. It's dripped all over her fingers now, staining her beautiful skin, and you are captivated by the image.

Rachel looks up, indignant rant building, but it dies seeing your condition.

"Oh, Brittany! How did you do that? Did you slip helping Kurt?" She looks closer at you, your fist still curled around the metal lodged in your hand. "That seems to be a fairly moderate amount of blood you lost... do you want me to fetch Tina? I assure you she will have no problem administering stitches after last week's... incident."

Shadow puts down whatever she was fiddling with in exasperation, her hand leaving a bloody print upon the porcelain sink. "Did I ask you to speak?" But she pauses anyway, thinking over her words. "Actually, you could be helpful. Go get me some thread and a needle."

Rachel eyes her doubtfully. "Do you even know how to perform a suture, Santana? I believe this requires a more practiced hand."

"If you don't get me what I wants, this hand will be practiced in the art of breaking your face," she threatens, glowering the best she can with their meager height difference, and Rachel cowers briefly before running off to find what she needs. You look at her for a few moments, right eyebrow slowly floating higher upon your face.

"What you wants?" You say with a hint of a tease, keeping a straight face when her glare turns to you.

"It's my Lima Heights Adjacent voice," she grumps, tugging you forward a little harder than necessary. "It always sent all the assholes running for cover."

Somewhere that has an adjacent in its name doesn't sound really all that frightening, but you keep your mouth shut as she instead scans your hand. She crinkles her nose, tugging gently at the metal, studying the way the meat of your fingers has also given away to seal it into your flesh. "How you're not screaming right now, I don't know," she muses, guiding your hand under the spray of water from the sink. The heat burns in a good way. A clean way. For a while, the water runs red.

"I don't really feel it," you reply, wincing a little when the metal bangs against the side of the sink. This sharp world brings some feelings to the surface and buries others under the waves—you feel every touch of her skin against yours, every breath that brushes against the back of your neck, every wave of her scent that sweeps across you. It blinds you to all else, even as she pries your fingers out of the ragged metal, spraying blood all over the faucet.

Upon inspection, you know it could have been worse. You don't see bone, and your fingers still move—the rest is simply... unfortunate. Shadow doesn't think so if the way she grimaces is any indication, wiggling the remains of the junk stuck in your palm and apologizing with her eyes when you hiss. (You're quickly learning that she, like you, doesn't do words. Yours get lost in translation, but hers simply refuse to leave.)

Your moment is broken by Rachel rushing back in with a needle, thread, and a frazzled expression. "Santana," she begins hurriedly, "I really must warn you against this course of action. What if you unwittingly set infection in her hand, and it has to be amputated?"

Shadow rolls her eyes, snatching the supplies from her grasp and placing them upon the sink lip. "Then I'm sure Tina will love to bitch to me the whole time. Until then, kindly fuck off and let me close this gaping hole in her skin."

Your lips quirk up into a little smile, staying up until she gets firm hold of the metal and looks at you with something that could be classified as a sympathetic smirk. You've never seen that before.

"I'd tell you this will hurt," she says, "but I think you've already gathered that."

"Gathered what?" You ask her cautiously, about to look around for a basket before she abruptly grabs your wrist with her other hand and yanks so hard she takes a piece of your flesh with her.

You don't scream, but you come really, really close.

"Fuck!" You gasp, arm trembling as its held under the water and the whole sink stains red with your tainted blood. "Oh, fuck, fuck, _fuck._" You're not sure who's swearing at this point, catching glimpses of the crevice in your hand that looks like some sort of little crater before the water fills it and takes away the image. She keeps your appendage under the stream long after you begin to lose feeling from the cold, eyes watering. Rachel stands in the corner with both hands over her mouth, watching you as you hunch and bow in pain around the sink and Shadow in turn.

(Shadow, for her part, only looks vaguely uncomfortable as you hang off her shoulder and shake. Does this make you friends?)

You take solace in the fact that it doesn't hurt nearly as much as your head, and after a few minutes the pain becomes manageable. Slowly, you draw your arm from the water to cradle it close to your chest, numb fingers freezing against the heat of your collar. Your eyes track Shadow as she loops the thread through the eye of the needle, tongue bitten in concentration, eyes narrowed. Her fingers are calloused, strong, baring scars and stories. You touch her nails and she jerks back from you with a scowl.

"The hell are you doing?" she snaps, protectively drawing her hand closer to herself. In the movement you see all the things left unsaid.

"Sorry," you say, even though your tone is flat and insincere. "You have nice nails."

She looks down at them, chipped and cracked, and raises her eyebrow doubtfully.

"They're strong," you try to explain further, "kinda like you. Loud, too."

Shadow looks at you with a hint of _that _expression but it never fully manifests; her head shakes and she takes you again by the wrist, more gently this time, turning your palm to the ceiling. Her skin looks good against yours.

"You might wanna look away, dwarf." She cautions Rachel gruffly, pressing the needlepoint to your flesh. You hear a pattering of footsteps that run out of the door, fading slowly into the silence of the hallway, and all of a sudden you are alone with her. (Again. Always.)

She licks her lips and has the decency to look mildly sheepish, twiddling with the metal caught between her fingers. "I've never done this before, so it might not be the prettiest patch job." She admits, glancing briefly to you but looking away almost instantly as your blue, blue stare meets hers.

"I'm used to ugly things," you say softly; she takes it as permission and pushes the needle into your hand without hesitation—you bare your teeth in surprise but don't move. After a few false starts on her part and quiet yelps from yours, Shadow picks up a slow, methodical rhythm that has your hand slowly closing back up into a rough estimate of the way it was originally. Perhaps the stitches are lopsided and sometimes go to different angles but you are grateful none the less; weeks ago it would have remained as it was, an open hole leading to a festering wound. How your head or your arm remained intact in the first place, you'll never know.

After a few minutes of comfortable silence she finishes up the work with an awkward knot that pinches slightly at the skin, but you flex your hand and note only a slight pain. A bandage is wrapped, pristine white, around your palm and tied off at the wrist. It brushes against the other dressings, situated higher up on your arm, and her fingers trail against it curiously as you pull away.

"What's that?" She asks, rinsing the needle with a sort of solution after passing it under the tap. You deliberate upon telling the truth, but you still don't trust her. Not entirely. Her hands have done healing, but you know what harm they can also do. (She writhes in her sleep sometimes, knuckles white and snapping invisible necks. You watch her silently from the doorway, barely breathing, as she whispers out names of people lost to another life.)

So you reply with a muttered _nothing_ and avoid her gaze until she gives up drilling her suspicious glare into the side of your head, wiping the remnants of (your) blood upon her jeans and giving up on the spatter on the tiles. You watch her try not to watch you with your arms crossed over your chest until her resolve breaks and she turns towards you with an angry frown.

"What?" She snaps in irritation, slamming down the tools harder than necessary. You flinch.

"What's what?" You reply, noting how much her eyebrows dip when she is frustrated. (But they crinkle when she laughs, too. You can't be two different things at once.)

"Why are you looking at me like that?" She asks in exasperation, mirroring your stance if not for the aggressive way in which her shoulders square.

Your fingers pick anxiously at your bandages and you shrug, plastering an innocent smile on your face. "Like what?"

But she'll have none of it; her scowl deepens, her nails sinking into her biceps as she stares you down. "Oh no, you don't get to play that game with me. You know exactly what I'm talking about this time."

It's unsettling the way she can read you, but she is still an enigma in the best of ways. Every turn of her lips can mean something different, every shift of her hips a story to tell. (You watch Puck watch her hips, too. He sees something else in them, something hungry and carnal. Sometimes you think you remember the feeling.)

"I don't understand you," you blurt out instead. "You keep saying you don't like me and you don't trust me but you help me. Those things don't match. Kind of like shrimp and chocolate milk."

She looks at you for a long, long time, until her eyes cut you down straight to your bare bones and you think she can see the sickness in your head, the thing that turns your thoughts to glass and your memories to dust. You feel opened up like all those weeks (months?) ago and you gently trace the seams of yourself under your shirt with your fingers, running over the glossy lines like a maze to which you never found the exit.

"Something's wrong with you," she says bluntly; your face twitches in hurt but it is a delayed thing, a dulled thing. You knew what she thought of you a long time ago. "Something's not right, maybe here," she points to her head, "or maybe here," her heart, "or everywhere. Who the fuck knows? But you've managed to survive this far even if you keep making these decisions that basically put you on the shuttle bus to Zombie Land and I wanna know why. I wanna know why _you_ get to survive while Puck's sister got eaten like a... a..."

She exhales through her nose in frustration, running her hand over her head. "God damn it, see, this is what you do to me! I can't even figure out a suitable slap down because your staring is so fucking creepy it's putting me off my game."

"What game?" you ask, and she narrows her eyes at you.

"I can't even tell if you're being sarcastic right now," she mutters, shaking her head. "Whatever. Point is, I want to know why the hell you're not dead, and that won't happen if your hand rots away and falls off."

That sounds painful.

You look at the silhouette of her roughshod stitches fondly, clenching your hand the best you can. Her eyes are dark, swirling with unease, but in them you sense an animal fear that masks itself as ferocity. She's afraid—why wouldn't she be? Caught in a world that tries to kill her day after day, fighting with herself and other people as much as she does with the sick. Yet she's still right, even after all the insults and the yelling and the mixed signals.

"Something is wrong with me," you admit quietly. She turns to you then, not surprised by your admission, but curious none the less. "I don't know what it is, but it's there. Maybe the sick people sense it too."

An idea forms behind her eyes, brightens them. Galaxies bloom within her mind and you ache for the light.

"You said they like you, right?" she says slowly, body inching towards the doorway.

You blink, curious now. "Yeah. They grumble a bit but I think they're just grumpy."

She grins, a feral thing with dubious intent. It makes her whole face seem sharper, angrier. You don't like it.

"Come on Britt, we're going on a field trip."

* * *

Turns out your field trip is just to the back courtyard, the scent of the air now cloying with the dead. She hooks her shirt over her nose and even you frown in distaste as you take in the rows upon rows of bodies lying motionlessly on the cement, having nowhere to decay except outwards. No soft earth greets their bones and they weep for the embrace of their first mother.

Their voices are so loud you almost cover your ears with your hands in fright.

She scrabbles her way onto an overhanging ledge, feet kicking in the air when she attempts to haul herself up. It's amusing how short she really is, her stature often exaggerated by the posture and intimidation that follows her every footstep. You smother a laugh when she ungracefully rolls herself up and over the side with a strained huff of air, resting there for a moment before peering down at you.

"You said that they like you, right?" She calls down, mindful to keep her voice as low as possible. You hear a few lungs but no hearts except the two of yours, beating alone together in this wasteland world.

You nod warily at her and she points off to where a woman sways on the spot, her addled mind debating entering the courtyard.

"Go say hi for me then." There is a challenge in her words, something you can't pick out from the whirlwind of her eyes. You bite your lip momentarily, shifting on the spot, before taking a few hesitant steps towards her. The woman's head swings slowly to the sound but she makes no move to advance.

Eventually you stand in front of her. She's one of the less wounded, physically speaking—her skin is grey but unblemished, her delicate brown hair matted down to her forehead. If not for the blood drenching her front and the glassy quality of her eyes, you could almost convince yourself she has a heart that beats too. Even her teeth are straight.

She stares right through you even when you wave your hand in front of her face. "Hi?" You say tentatively, holding your ground when her face turns towards the sound of your voice. "What's your name? I'm Brittany."

Upon impulse you hold your hand out for her to shake. The sick don't bother you with their touches, their cold skin that feels too close to fake, cheaply done leather. There is no malice in their caress, no ulterior motive in their embrace. Not for you. She stares at it for a moment before she clamps down on your wrist with an iron hold, tugging you forward until you collide with her shoulder in an awkward hug. So close you can smell the rot that has taken up home in the deepest parts of her, radiating outwards from hidden pores and the gaps in her ears. You grimace, but stay still as she brings your hand up to her mouth and chews at your new bandages, gnawing at them with her blunt teeth in an attempt to rid them from you.

You glance over at Shadow—her frown is cautious and she slowly raises her rifle (the only one in the compound), slung over her back, to eye level. You shake your head in disagreement and shuffle so that you block her line of sight; she'd have to put (another) bullet in you to kill the woman. Vaguely, you hear her huff of exasperation.

"That's a waste of supplies, you know." You scold the woman who now has your bandages hanging in shreds from her mouth. She moans quietly and grips at your fingers so hard it crushes, bringing your broken palm to her face. Her tongue snakes out and licks a long, freezing stripe up the length of your wound and you grimace as her saliva wets the stitches. The sick all have the same spit, thick and cold and so unpleasantly slimy that it sends the hair on your arms on end, shuddering as you rip your hand away. She moves her mouth a few times, the taste of your blood heavy on her tongue; something in it must displease her for she releases you and makes to move further into the courtyard.

Until the bullet sent from Shadow's gun rips off half her face.

You watch numbly as her body spins in a clumsy pirouette before falling to the ground, what remains of her face splattering onto the concrete. She twitches a few times, wheezing, her mangled jaw scraping upon the ground as she moves it. Her skull has been blown away on her right side, an uneven mask, and you see her brain slump from its cavity a moment before she goes still.

Everything is silent for a moment and you take the time to look upwards where Shadow is just lowering her rifle, grip still tight, with an unreadable expression that looks vaguely apologetic. A scent wafts through the haze of rot and it triggers something primal in you, the thing that aches so strong ever since the man last week. Shadow, in her hurry to line up the shot, had positioned herself wrong and received recoil strong enough to split her lip in two; blood dribbles from the wound and you smell it above everything else, above the rot and the smoke and the brain matter steadily leaking from the woman's head. You know what you need and you've temporarily given up on denying what you want, not until the cycle repeats itself. Hopefully Shadow won't blow out your brains either.

You run to your bike and mount the saddle, kicking up the stand and ignoring the shouts for you to return. The gunshot will have drawn attention to your home, such a loud sound against the silence, and Shadow will have to retreat if she doesn't want to risk becoming a corpse upon the sidewalk. But you? You have something _else_. Your legs pump as you wheel from this place in a desperate attempt to distance yourself from the smell of her essence that makes your gums ache.

It follows you, lodged deep in your nose, haunting your tortured breathing as you tear down the broken roads at breakneck speed. She is the phantom in your fractured dreams, and you shake your head so hard you wobble on your bike before flying off, rolling over the sidewalk a few times and skinning your hands where you fall. The new wound in your hand cries outrage but the stitches hold as you come to a stop lying motionless on the pavement. A few of the sick wander past but pay you no mind as you stare up at the blue, blue sky.

You entertain the fleeting thought that you could simply lay here forever until you become one with the derelict buildings that now make up New York, but even so far away you still smell it, smell her. With a low groan you roll on your stomach and pound uselessly at the ground, pulling at your hair and grinding your face into the concrete.

"Go _away_." You mutter to yourself, staggering to your feet and dragging your bike back on two wheels. You debate going further but instead spy the subway stairs; descending steps lead to a great yawning abyss underground, where even from here you can hear the wheezing lungs of others whose bodies have steered them to the tracks. It seems as good a place as any to disappear for a few hours until you can regain control over yourself again, so you lean your bike up against the side of a nearby building (not like anybody is going to try and steal it) and cautiously start your trek into the dark, cloying tunnels.

They are dank and smell like stale human fear, the tiles of the floor sticky with unknown substances that you skirt around as you descend deeper into the depths. It wipes away all traces of her from your nose and you breath a short sigh of relief; the hunger is still there, yearning, but it has lost its focus and its drive. You inhale and chase the scent of fresh blood.

Maybe you are an animal, maybe you are something more. These endless passageways, coded by color and numbers, confuse your addled mind and you duck through corridors that you never knew existed. If what you once were lived here, wouldn't you remember at least some of this? The polished tiles, the stainless steel, the winding tracks. Your fingers trail upon the walls as you reach the trains themselves, recoiling slightly as they run through a splatter of wet _something_ stuck to the wall. You don't really want to know what it is and the darkness has not yet lifted enough to render a proper verdict.

Emerging by the tracks, you can see where the true panic started. A train lies abandoned at the station, its lights still on after so long, blinking and casting intermittent shadows upon the floor. Its doors ding helplessly as it attempts to close, only to be halted by the bodies that spill out of the cavity and into the station, legs and arms and heads and shoulders sticking out and blocking its path. Every few seconds is a chime followed by a hissing noise as it reopens; it threatens to drive you insane.

Peering into the train shows more of the same thing. People had run, obviously, tried to escape whatever had found itself on their subway route; they are sprawled out on the chairs, over the floor, caught from the ceiling. One little boy nearly made it out, protruding out the door if not for the mess of bone and blood that had become of his ankle as he was running. You gently roll him back into the train.

All this flesh is rank, unappealing; people had come here to die, not to live. Bodies are curled up on the little benches, cradling wounds to the head and sides, all dressed up with nowhere to go. A few shufflers walk amongst the rubble, mindlessly kicking up dirt clouds and the few rodents that skitter across the achingly empty station. Your nose crinkles in distaste as you imagine trying to eat the meat blackened by rot and disease alike.

(It's so nice to know you still have standards.)

You quietly hop down on the tracks and follow their route, your feet crunching the boards underneath them. It's so nice and quiet here, no booming heartbeats to ruin your silence. You could live here, you think, here with the darkness and the silence and the dead. At least they don't eat your food and use your bathrooms and wear your clothes.

A shuffle breaks your concentration. You stop and hold your breath, listening as the rapid crunch of footfalls hitting the wooden boards invades your ears. Something inside you forces you to a crouch, plastering yourself against the wall; your vision sharpens and you make out the silhouette of a person hurrying their way down the tracks, pack jingling ever so softly on their shoulders. There's only one.

Alone in such a place? It's a death sentence.

(You ignore the irony.)

The person has a flashlight—they slow to a halt and shine it around them in a desperate attempt to illuminate their surroundings. The beam of light catches your shoe and the wild flailing freezes ever so suddenly, flicking upwards to distinguish your face. They're too far away, and you sense their terror as readily as your own.

"Who's there?" The voice trembles—a woman, then. You lick your lips anxiously as you smell blood leaking from various wounds across her body, soaked up by bandages but there none the less. That primal thing in you rears and screams as it attempts to break itself from the cage you have so hastily trapped it in.

But this is no place for a person. You advance into the light with your hands raised placatingly by your ears, squinting into the strong beam of light cast by the large flashlight in her hand. Her shoulders visibly relax when she takes in your appearance, unarmed and unbitten, your eyes blinking rapidly in discomfort.

"God, I thought you were one of them." She lowers her weapon of choice—a large knife, sharp as a sword—with a long huff of air, taking another once over of your figure once she catches her breath. You feel the disapproving gaze from miles away. "Why aren't you armed?"

"I forgot it at home." You say, eyes flicking down into the darkness of the tracks where you hear the faint echo of footsteps approaching, the familiar and distinct shuffle of dragging feet that are unique to the sick. She hasn't noticed them yet, not with the way she's looking at you, but staying here much longer will ensure there's nowhere to run.

"You have a place to stay?" She asks curiously, moving forward and away from the noises. They follow her.

You debate your response because you don't trust her at all—she has loud hands, drenched in the fluids of her enemies and gripping still so tight to her weapon. If she so wanted to, her knife would sink into the flesh of your neck without a concern and you would be left here, alone, dying on the tracks with nobody there to help you. Sometimes you don't value your life as much as you should, but nobody wants that to be their last memory.

"I never said that." You mutter, attempting to step away, but she grabs hold of your wrist so quickly your heart stutters in its cage.

Her eyes are the ones of an animal trapped with nowhere to go. "Yes you did," she snarls lowly, tugging you forward until your hips nearly bump with hers, "now tell me where, or I'll put this through your face."

"You don't want to do that." Your warnings go unheeded as her grip becomes impossibly tighter. You begin to panic, your breath escalating until it bounces harshly around the tunnels. "You really, really don't want to do that."

"Why's that?" she sneers at you; your eyes focus behind her shoulder and you feel a brief regret for what you're about to do.

"Because I won't hurt you," you say, stepping forward until you've trapped her in a bear-hug that smothers, "but they will." You propel yourself forward, sending both of you stumbling into the darkness beyond. Her heel catches on one of the tracks and she begins to fall, a scream caught in her throat, but cold hands catch her by the shoulders and drag her backwards still. You untangle yourself hastily with your heart beating loudly in your ears as the first of the sick manage to sink their teeth into the tender crook of her neck, blood spurting all over the walls and floor. She cries out with a hoarse, tortured sound you know will follow your footsteps long after you leave this place.

Sitting down as you are, her blood soaks your flimsy sandals and bare toes until your nails are painted an uneven red. She gurgles a few times, attempting to draw herself away as others join the frenzy, her legs dragging uselessly upon the ground. She stares at you with accusing eyes that burn until the first sick one flails for purchase and finds it on her face, his fingers digging into the sockets of her eyes and erasing that stare forever. It is her last sound of protest.

Long after they have wandered away, you crawl to her remains. The curve of her spine is visible from where they have torn away the muscle and ligaments, a sea serpent void of its ocean. The ugly glint of her innards bulge from a gaping wound in her stomach that spill out onto the ground and leave a bitter scent to the otherwise sweet smell of blood. One of her legs at the knees has been torn away; it reminds you so much of your sister that you bury your face in her back instead to rid yourself of the memory, allowing yourself to be swept away by the welcomed taste of her flesh and the way it erases all vestige of thought.

(You are slowly coming to terms with the fact that you might not be as you once were, before this happened. Different. Perhaps the sickness in your head has spread to your body?)

The clashing thoughts inside your head have calmed and the world has fallen away from that glass edge you so often walk. Now, free from the burden of your senses, you are able to straighten up and look around properly. The annihilated corpse of the woman that breathed only minutes before instills no sympathy or pity within you; not with her loud hands and angry eyes.

Nothing but darkness greets you in both directions. You attempt to figure out where you came from, but your altercation with the woman has succeeded in spinning you around so thoroughly that any sense of direction has been lost. Sighing, you wipe at your mouth with your hand (only managing to smear more blood over your face) and begin the trek in a random direction, hoping beyond hope it's the correct path.

It isn't.

The trains look the same but the placement of the bodies is different, the wrong people spread out in the wrong places. You haul yourself over the lip of the tracks and clamber dazedly to your feet, awkwardly shoving a sick man out the way when he attempts to knock you off balance. The station is almost identical to the previous one except the colors are different, the lines that paint it wrong. You aren't worried enough to panic, not with her flesh so heavy and warm in your stomach, but your concern mounts slightly as you walk up to the street and find no bike leaning up against the nearest wall. All the buildings look different, too; skyscrapers jammed together rather than the lower lying buildings you are so used to. You grimace, descending back into the subway hastily with your footsteps bounding off the walls.

Running over to a kiosk, after a few tries you manage to break through the flimsy wooden entry door with a bang. Your hands make bloody prints as you shuffle through the pieces of paper, pulling out little folded tourist maps that are useless when you realize you never figured out what street your compound was on. Even the subway maps are a maze of different colors and winding tunnels that make no sense; you bang your head on the wall in irritation as you flick your bloody hair away from your face and stare out into the station. Should you stay here or attempt to navigate a place that all looks the same? You glance upwards towards the outside world that has begun to darken with dusk, dimming the meager light that filters into the subway. The overhead lights have all but burnt out after weeks and weeks of little to no upkeep, and your (in)human eyes struggle to make out details in the gloom.

So instead you step hesitantly onto the train, gingerly rolling some of the overflowing bodies onto the station floor. They leave smears on the walls as you murmur your apologies, picking up the limbs that fall off as you drag them out. The lights flicker but still function, casting invisible shadows upon all of the surfaces. Once you clear a space big enough for you to lay down you sigh, dropping down and using the torso of a dead man for your pillow, his chest gone squishy with decay. It smells unpleasant but is far preferable to the hard floor.

It's strange that even though you often wish they would be quiet, you miss the heartbeats and breathing of your new companions in the compound. Without it, the station takes on an eerily silent lilt, like a world holding its breath. Your sleep comes uneasy and fractured without their constant cadence drowning out the whisper of your own thoughts that seethe around your mind. You still taste the woman on your tongue and feel her blood drying on your face, a sticky mess that clings to your clothes and your hair. Eventually you'll have to clean yourself up if you want to keep this facade of normalcy around the others, but now, wallowing with the dead, it seems the least of your concerns.

Not like they think you're normal anyway. You're convinced Puck is going to try and kill you in your sleep.

Closing your eyes, you force yourself into a deep sleep until morning. For the first time in a long while, you don't dream of who you used to be.


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N: **Well... I was tired I guess and uploaded the un-beta'd portion of this fic. Here's the re-upload, which isn't so terribly different, just more polished and actually correct than the last one. Thanks to my beta as usual for pointing out my failure.

* * *

**Chapter 7**

**a few hours since last feed**

You sit around feeling sorry for yourself for a while, but the days start to blur together under the dim light of the subway. It's nice, being able to eat whenever you want, but the blood has begun to dry on your front and the lack of _actual_ food (human food) begins to erode at your... what? Your sanity? You don't think you have much of that left. Your humanity, maybe. That seems like a better word.

You feel like an animal again, trapped in your own body, somewhere between the waking world and the dead. On the (what you believe to be) the third day, you decide that the subway is not the best place for you.

With a smile you bid farewell to the murmuring corpses, stroking the hair of the woman who is nothing more than bones and sinew now. You had long taken her backpack and weapon with you, hooking it into the loop of your cargo pants and securing her pack around your shoulders, the weight anchoring you to the ground. In a bout of foolishness you had even taken her stupid little _New York Zoo_ visor that she wore because you liked the imprinted animals on it. It is a bit bloodstained, sure, but as you emerge out into the city streets you're glad you brought it.

The pavement _burns_.

It's a dry, radiating heat that buffets you in waves, shimmering up from the roads and barely letting you slip by whenever you pass. Being so long in the dark means your eyes are turned to slits, wincing at every dull reflection from a car's rearview mirror, stopping every once in a while to grimace at your appearance and attempt to pick the worst of the flesh from your teeth. What you wouldn't do for some floss right now.

Earlier on you'd picked up a little tourist map from the subway, attempting to puzzle out the confusing maze of lines that make up the city. You'd given up on reading street names, instead resigning yourself to retracing your steps again and again until you got a rough marker of your location. Once settled, you squint at the map and decipher out the neighborhood.

"Manhattan,"you mouth to yourself, glancing up at the towering buildings, "home to countless buildings of all different shapes and sizes, it is a borough of New York that displays both its charm and its power. A sprawling city that is divided into many districts."

_That sounds confusing_, you think as you bite your lip in thought and trace over to where you must be. Middle of the map? So that should be...

"Midtown!" you cry in triumph, putting a hand over your mouth when it echoes lonely through the abandoned streets. The few sick shuffling about don't bother to turn and you smile, subdued now, pouring over the map in an effort to learn more. Rachel had said it was a tragedy or travesty or whatever that word was that you hadn't been out to see all New York had to offer, so you decide to take her word for it and do just that. You'll go see the that big tower over there and the parks and the super nice houses... but not the zoo to the east. You're not sure if animals fared so well over the course of the sickness and seeing them all wasting away in their pens is a bit too sad for you to take. Animals are simpler things; you like them much more than people.

(You had a cat, once. He's the only thing you really remember. You hope he's okay.)

Your journey starts by going west, marveling at the huge buildings that dwarf and render you insignificant. All around you are the rattling lungs hidden in the dark, ruined skyscrapers; they create their own rhythm that the pamphlet said the city used to have, its own industrial heartbeat that resonated inside the chests of all its inhabitants. Every so often you hear the jack-rabbit heart of a survivor, hidden away in the concrete, but it vanishes before you can find it again.

The sun stains your skin a ruddy red as your fingers grip onto your map, your visor shading your eyes from the worst of it. By taking a quick detour through the Theatre District it says you're in Upper West Side now, a beautiful place full of museums and markets, classic houses with an aging face but peculiar charm. Such attractions did them no good in the long run; this place is as silent as all the others, abandoned to the dead and Mother Nature who seeks to reclaim her stolen world. Your footsteps are gunshots against the sidewalk, and no matter where you turn you seem to see a church looming down upon you.

Every so often you pass a place that makes you stop and stare, but nothing triumphs the one museum that halts you in your tracks. A massive, pillared thing, you stall and gape at the huge banner of the blue, blue whale that billows in the soft breeze, beckoning you forwards until you stand at its doors. Even from the outside you see the slumped silhouettes of corpses covering the floor like a carpet, their hands splayed upon each other in solidarity. Dinosaurs rear up to the curved ceiling, their mouths opened in triumphant roars of another life.

Before you enter you glance at the little sign that asks you to _give what you can_ for an entrance fee. You've no money on you and you doubt they'd want it now—instead, you drop in a little air freshener you'd found earlier in hopes one of them would appreciate it. It might not do _much_ good, but it's better than nothing at all.

Even though you remember so little of your former life, you know that animals were always one of your greatest loves. You spend what feels like years in the ocean hall, marveling at skeletons of beasts long passed, free to run your fingers over their bones now that their keepers have all gone to rot. Each plaque is read and re-read with the hopes of burning it into your memory, each oddity thoroughly examined. The sick that shuffle about mutter their agreement at your wonder as they, too, touch the glass with their fingers and pass by the exhibits. The whale from the outside hangs overhead like a guardian, its sheen refracting until the whole dimly lit passageway glows a soft ocean blue.

You make your way from the blue hall to the glass hall, peering up at the planets suspended from the rafters. The effect is only slightly ruined by the dead that have somehow managed to find their way up there, too, their blood running down the sides of the planets and tainting them from their original glory. There are books for sale here, almost untouched in the chaos. You pick up a heavy one by a man called Stephen Hawking, scanning over the simple title _A Brief History of Time. _It seems complicated, but you think Shadow might like it.

You bite your lip anxiously as you think about her, your mind briefly flashing to the courtyard and the expression on her face as you ran. You've learned to speak in silence and her silence speaks volumes; you believe there is a person hidden somewhere under the shell of a survivor. She speaks harsh and her eyes hold a dark glint, but you've seen her reading ragged little paperbacks when she thinks nobody's looking, of science and fantasy and complicated looking theories that make no sense to your broken brain. Her thick rimmed glasses, cracked on one lens, soften her edges and almost makes her seem like she could be beautiful.

(Oh, you know she is, but her sharpness makes her too cruel and too angry for it to shine through. Only people with eyes to see can notice, and now the world is blind.)

Before you can over think it, you slip it into your backpack and vow to give it to her when you can (if you can). Maybe then she'll see you're more than your broken parts.

There must have been a special presentation here; a man stands slumped over a podium while his onlookers sprawl out upon the floor and over chairs, up against the displays. In them are animals evolving into men, hulking figures with thick brows striking stones together to create life. You peer further into the glass, following the legacy of your ancestors, stepping over the corpses of their descendants until you reach the last exhibit where the glass covering has been shattered and scattered upon the floor. A different figure stands there instead; you didn't realize Neanderthals wore sneakers.

"You look kinda funny next to them," you tell the mannequin, jumping back with a yelp when his head slowly turns to look at you.

He looks almost normal, but his eyes are wrong and betray him as one of the sick—he wears a simple long shirt and a pair of well kept jeans, frayed only at the heel. The skin you can see is grey but not putrid, cold but not slick. His mouth gapes open as he mindlessly takes you in; you with your blood-covered front and your wide eyes and your trembling fingers. Thrust through his chest looks to be a thighbone of an ancient beast, its weight pulling his torso down to the floor and hunching him until his knuckles brush the tile. Even so, he still towers above you. The dull glint of his ribs is visible around the wound.

"Hey," you whisper to him, "are you okay? That looks like it hurts." He stares and stares until he shuffles forward ever so slightly, the bone dragging with him shattering the silence of the museum. His heavy body steps down from the display until his breath brushes your face, laden with rot. Your eyes sweep over his flat features.

"Do I know you?" you ask, frowning. Something about him seems familiar, an echo of another life.

_("Hey, Britt."_

_ "Yeah?"_

_ "You wanna play basketball?"_

_ "You're an orangutan, you'll climb over me."_

_ "So? Better than waiting for another needle."_

_ "I guess. Bring it on!")_

You bring a gentle hand to his face and cup his cold cheek, running your thumb tenderly against the bridge of his nose as he turns into you. He can't answer, not with the vocal chords that have been silenced until his bones turn to dust and he is but a breath upon stranger's air, but the blank green eyes speak volumes. You try a smile to lift his monotone spirits.

"I think I do. Do you know me?"

Maybe it's wishful thinking, but the way he stares at you when you speak says something else entirely.

"You should have a name. Do you have one?" You look around his body, digging into his pockets for a wallet and sighing when you come up blank. He just watches you the entire time, his hands touching your soft skin whenever possible and staring so intently at your mouth. "I guess I can give you one instead. You can be... Brad? Jason?"

None of them sound right. You cast your eyes about and eventually they land on the name of the artist who created the displays, and you grin. Perfect.

"John?" His head turns again from where he was distracted, and it feels a little like fate. "Okay, John it is!" You swing his arms in your grip, excited to have company. "Do you want to come see the rest of the museum with me? We still have the dinosaurs to see. Though..." you look at the bone protruding from his chest, "it looks like you've already been."

He wheezes and you take it as agreement, so you hold his hand and drag him along with you. It's slow going as the bone grates along the floor but he manages, stumbling to catch up as you grip his clammy palm and keep him moving. You stand in awe of the dinosaurs and mammoths together, looking at the replicas of the angry saber-tooth tigers with their jaws bared in a frozen grimace. Having somebody around with you that doesn't ask questions or berate you is a nice change... it doesn't remind you of a friend, really, but more of a pet. Maybe you should get him a collar?

Eventually you come across the mounted skeleton of an _Allosaurus _with a thighbone missing that has it tilting dangerously to one side. You glance at John and the matching bone that curves him forward, biting your lip. "Maybe we should give it back?" you ask him hesitantly, touching the bone and growing bolder when he doesn't move. Its weight is immense, and it takes all your strength to lift it—John's torso follows, scraping against his ribs and spine, eventually levering him upright where he towers a good foot above you. He stares off into the distance as you tug, his body staggering with the force. Eventually you manage to yank the bulbous cap of the bone through him where it sends splinters of ribs flying in all directions. You grunt as it falls to the ground again, heaving it over to the dinosaur where it may reclaim its parts. John glances at his ribs that now protrude out of his body rather than in, but makes no move to fix them.

"You can stand up now, you know," you inform him, gently pressing at a rib or two to force them back into his chest cavity. He mumbles in annoyance and moves past you, his body still curved and fingers touching the floor.

You and your pet finally make your way out of the museum; you note with a mild alarm that the sun has disappeared under the cover of night. How long did you stay in there? Without a calendar or other people to keep you in check the minutes of the day slide through your grasp like sand, unable to be kept or tracked. There is still so much more to see, though, so much of the city to canvas, that which hasn't already been ruined by the dead.

Yet the streetlights have long since begun to dull, and even with your vision that cuts away the shadows the world seems more menacing somehow, dangerous and angry without the sun's guiding glow. John's hand in yours is the only thing that keeps you from bolting, his stiff joints unable to keep up a run—though you do note he moves far better than the others, giving him an almost normal gait if not for his hunch. Together you roam the streets of a city left abandoned and read the notes of the ones left behind, sprayed in dark paint upon the bricks, warning of the things that go bump in the night. Almost all of them scream _zombie_ or _Z _or _dead_ and you wonder to yourself if your companions at the compound really were right after all.

"Are you a zombie, John?" you ask him as you return to the Upper East Side, carefully wiping the drool from his chin with his bloodied shirt. He groans and mouths at your fingertips like a child as you draw away. "It would make sense, wouldn't it? I can't hear your heart beating... but that doesn't mean you don't have one. Maybe it's sleeping." But no, that bone would have long obliterated anything useful inside of his chest, and, well... you might be bordering on stupid but you know that people can't live without a heart. It's all so surreal... a zombie apocalypse, of all things. The scientists who said the world was going to end with the sun were so far off.

Together you find yourselves in front of the Empire State Building. This was the last on your list for Manhattan and you saved it until the end specifically so it could finish on a breathtaking note. Ever since you woke up in the cold, bright morgue you've wanted to fly.

"Do you want to come with me?" But he's already begun to wander into one of the adjacent buildings, staggering slightly over the broken concrete. You suppose it would be cruel to subject him to all the stairs when he can barely walk properly. "John?" You call to him in a surprisingly timid voice; his head swings to you as he waits. "Wait for me?" He says nothing before continuing on his path, but you hope beyond hope that he will.

Your footsteps echo lonely in the massive foyer as you step into the building; everywhere is the gleam of finery and polished riches, almost fake against the chaos surrounding it. Though blood smears the perfect shine and bodies rot on the leather couches, it does little to take away from its glamour—if anything it enhances it, still beautiful in a wasteland world. The elevator dings softly, its doors forever open as the light flickers inside. How much longer will the city have electricity? Your days of darkness are so readily approaching.

You've always wanted to see the world, you think. Though you lack concrete memories, you have a vague notion of wanting to explore, to witness what mankind had to offer. It would make sense why you're here in a city you think is so far from home with nothing but ghosts of a former life. It makes every new thing enthralling, every floor of this towering building a thing to be explored. You know enough math that you could starve in here, if you weren't careful, roaming every room and checking behind every doorway. It isn't so much the beautiful shiny things that you want (they are pretty, sure, but all pretty things are worthless now) but the experience of it, a tourist in a world that has no time for strangers. Your breath begins to huff by the twentieth floor and you regret not eating more—human flesh eaten once a week sustains you for only so long, and your wasted muscles are none too happy at being put through the strain. Maybe Mike can train you and you can be strong like him.

If you even see them again, anyway. You have no clue where the compound was, only that it lacked the towering buildings that surround you now in Manhattan. They weren't residential streets, really, not enough green for the suburbs; maybe an in between between the two. Brooklyn, perhaps? Queens? Staten Island is too far and you don't even know if they have a subway. Probably not. You wonder how they're doing, if they're all alive. Maybe a few days have passed, maybe a week. It doesn't seem like long but things can go to shit so easily that you've given up debating a long time ago.

At the eighty-fourth floor you groan and lean back on the steps, throwing your head back in exhaustion. You'd underestimated how long it would take to get up there and just how much effort it takes, but it's too late to turn back now and you can almost taste the fresh air. Strangely enough, you haven't seen a single sick person on your journey upwards. You'd think the building would be crawling with them, so many people trapped with no escape when the sickness hit.

Eventually you drag yourself to the top, coming across a gift shop before the last set of stairs leading to the roof. It's obvious people have been here, shelves dragged over other doors and little plushies scattered everywhere; you pick up one of a duck and stuff it in your backpack. Guilty pleasures.

Throwing yourself out on the roof is a relief hardly believed. Your cheek rests on the cool concrete and you lay there for a small lifetime, letting the wind brush over your hair. Eventually you open your eyes and crawl over to the lip of the building, propping your arms up upon the little rim and staring out into the city below.

In retrospect, maybe you should have come in the daylight. But still, with your eyesight that makes shadows yield to you, it is obvious how high up you are, a soaring bird free of the streets. It is eerie, how dark the city is, nary a pinprick of light shining through the gloom. Perhaps in the distance is something that could maybe be a floodlight, but more likely it is the result of the explosion of stars above you; constellations long lost play across the sky in brilliant hues of blue and red, gleaming white and shedding their eternal guidance upon the civilization that has lost its way. You wonder how many supernovae have burned their own galaxies away, whether your own will deliver you the mercy.

(With Earth's record, you sincerely doubt it.)

Upon further inspection, it's obvious that a group of people lived up here. Sleeping bags are strewn about upon the benches that line the space, and cans are stacked in a little corner—corn and tuna and beans and even a container or two of dry noodles with the picture of a bird on it. Your mouth waters and you dive for it before you can over think the repercussions of your actions.

Maybe you don't need it to live but you crave it as a long conditioned ache that will never go away—your stomach growls its content as you crunch through the hard noodles, shoving powdered cheese in your mouth with your hands. It's been so _long_ since you've eaten anything with flavor. It sticks to your teeth and scrapes down your throat when you swallow, but that's okay, really; it's food and it's so good and it's something you can feel okay eating. People still make you guilty when you see their bare bones and their still heart, especially when sometimes they get back up later, your teeth marks still visible in their flesh. Are you making them sick too?

There was a fence here, once. Something has wrenched it from its mooring somehow, thrown it out of alignment and made it droop open. You wonder what would have the kind of force to do such a thing but quickly run out of ideas and shake your head, resigning yourself to never knowing. Maybe it's for the better?

You do a slow pace along the perimeter, eyes zeroing in on the gleam of dull metal. A gun—large, too. It has grips and a massive barrel and a thing on the top that you don't know what it does until you look through it and the world is put into such focus that you can read the graffiti so very far away. You run your hand against its shell and decide to take it. Maybe you'll feel bad eventually, but they have so many others that they won't miss one. (Where did they get all those? Maybe they stole them too. The blood on the handles would attest to that.)

Slinging it over your shoulder, you pull yourself up to where two ledges meet and stare down at the sprawling city spread out beyond and below. Not too long ago you would have thrown yourself from here if given the chance, your world so full of indecision and agony that the wait was never worth the reward. But now... now you have people that you know will miss you if you're gone (at least some of them). You think of Tina and Mercedes and Mike and Artie and Shadow, who likes you in her own razor-wire way, and the fact that not all of them will be here by the time the year is out. It's pretty much inevitable. It hurts in a way that you think is related to affection—you aren't sure, it's been so long since you've felt so much anyway.

Maybe it's time to go home.

There is a commotion near the door and you pause as you take out your map, looking over as two figures enter the rooftop. They joke among each other but pause as they look at you; the staring match that ensues has you frozen.

Eventually, one speaks.

"Hah, look at this one! It looks like a fuckin' tourist! With a sweet-ass gun, anyway." He has a muscle shirt with a leather jacket over top, a pipe clenched in one hand and a heavy looking shotgun in the other. He reminds you of Puck with his sneer and the tone that is too close to mocking for it to be anything other than insulting in a way you can't grasp. "Has a map an' everything!"

The other boy, skinnier, looks at you nervously. "How did it get up here? We barricaded the way up a long time ago. Do you think there's another way?"

"Calm your shit," Muscle-shirt scoffs, "maybe we jus' missed one or somethin'. It looks pretty stupid anyway, jus' starin' at us. Maybe its brain's gone or some shit." His mouth curves into an evil grin. "You think it'll try'n bite me if I push it off the roof?"

He advances on you despite the boy's anxious _bro, maybe you shouldn't..._ from behind him. Your eyes lock at the same time that you open your mouth.

"Can you not do that? I don't want to die today."

Muscle-shirt halts almost immediately and gapes at you like you're suddenly a mystical being, a god come down to earth. His friend (brother?) lets out a gasp of surprise and takes a step back, towards the door.

"You... you're alive?!" Muscle-shirt sputters, taking in your mouth and shirt soaked through with the blood of your meals. "The fuck you doin' up here? This is our turf!"

Your eyebrows raise. "Is it? Nobody told me. I went to the museum today to see the whales and wanted to come here next. I've never been to New York, you know." You shrug then, unapologetic. "I dunno why you think it's your turf, there's nothing like the sea close to here."

"Turf, not surf," the younger boy says after a few moments of deliberation. "Like, our land? Home?"

"Oh, like the compound?" you ask with a smile. "That makes more sense. I just wanted to see the view."

Muscle-shirt throws his hands up in the air. "This is fuckin' ridiculous. The world has gone to shit with a zombie apocalypse and you're gone outside _sight-seeing?_ You fucked in the head or somethin'? You must be, doing stupid shit like that."

_Now_ he sounds like Puck, and you cross your arms over your chest defensively. "They like me. They don't try to hurt me. See, look." You fiddle with your sleeve and pull up your bandage, showing them the bite mark. It's closing now, scabbed over but not an ugly shade of red; it could be mistaken for an unfortunate knife slip in another life, if not for the imperfect but distinct crescent. "It only kind of hurts now and they haven't tried since." It remains to be seen _who when _ or _why_, but the _what_ has been solved.

You're not prepared for the gun that whips up to point at your forehead, Muscle-shirt's face caught in a thunderous scowl. "You infected too? That's fuckin' rich, Blondie. Bet you're gonna turn any minute now."

"Turn?" You frown at him, never taking your eyes off the barrel aimed between your eyes. "I don't want to look at the street, you might shoot me."

The younger boy advances, his hands hovering nervously over his weapon. "Wait a minute, man." He says to Muscle-shirt, who looks at him so fiercely you think he'll wither under its force.

"The fuck you doin', little bro? If you think I'm lettin' you get near this psycho bitch, you got another thing comin'," he snaps, but does nothing as his brother continues towards you. His eyes are kinder, blue like the sea.

He smiles at you and you smile back. "Show me your arm again?" he asks, and because he's so nice about it you do, revealing the wound and the slow, beginning scar. His eyes rake over it from a distance before letting out a breath. "You say one of them bit you?" he asks seriously, and within the question is a deeper answer you aren't sure you have.

"I dunno," you reply, "I woke up one day and it was like this, all super gross and leaking and everything. It really hurt... but it's healing now and I don't think it's infected. I'm pretty sure it's not an animal though."

"No kidding." He blows out a breath, too heavy for somebody so young. "Look, you... you should come down from there. We can work this out."

Muscle-shirt makes a noise of protest, but you step down anyway, subconsciously adjusting the strap of the weapon across your chest. It draws his attention.

"Nice gun you got there, Blondie," he says with a smirk, "a bit too nice for such a pretty girl. You should hand it over... don't want you to get hurt."

You frown, shuffling backwards a little. "No, that's okay." _It's mine now_, your mind says angrily, tightening your grip around the sling. Muscle-shirt doesn't take no for an answer, advancing until you can see down the barrel of the shotgun he's holding. You have strange, fevered flashes of another life.

"Give it to me," he says firmly, reaching to grab it from you. You slap his hand away as it comes, but not soon enough; his hand grasps the strap and he looks at it, eyeing the red stripe that runs underneath. "You know," he says lowly, "that looks real like somethin' I've seen before... wouldn't happen to know anythin' about that, would you? Brian, check the guns."

A patter of footsteps, followed by rustling and an intake of breath. "We're missing one."

Muscle-shirt turns back to you with a venomous smirk. "Tryin' to steal from us, huh? You fuckin' bitch, thinkin' you can get away with that shit. _I _think we should teach you a lesson." His eyes rake down your frame and your heart starts to hammer; he reminds you more of Sam now and his eyes that follow you across the room even when you can't see him, and maybe even of Puck with the way he looks at Shadow when he _knows_ she's looking.

"N-no, I didn't—" But he backs you up until you're pressed against the ledge, the shotgun barrel cold against your stomach. His brother is saying something, telling him not to, but you can't hear him over the blood rushing in your ears and the... the...

Lungs. So many lungs.

You open your mouth to warn them but he presses a hand to it, smothering you, and you thrash in an attempt to get free. Noises are coming from your throat in shrill bursts as he forces you down to the ground, sitting on your hips so heavily it's impossible to break loose. Now his hands are over you and you feel _dirty_, tainted, and your first shriek comes as he palms your breasts roughly with a smirk.

"Nobody's gonna hear you, Blondie, so let it all out." He hisses as he grabs at the collar of your shirt. He's just so heavy, and you can't move, and all you hear is the wheezing from below and your yelling and his brother's yelling and it's all too _much_ too soon too fast, and you swallow a rough sob.

"Jared, stop it!" His brother—Brian—pleads, tugging at his arm; he's shoved to the ground where he sprawls out, stunned—moment's later there's the sound of ripping fabric and air hits your skin and he jerks back, repulsed.

"The fuck..." Jared whispers, staring down at the thick marks the man who played with you last left for the world. You attempt to cover yourself, vision blurred, but he pins your wrists to the ground. "Oh no, you ain't gettin' out of this just 'cause you're fuckin' ugly," he snarls, reaching for the buckle of your pants.

Before he can, chaos erupts.

The lungs you hear are suddenly so much louder and they burst through the door, their footsteps dragging along the ground. Their first victim is the little one, descending upon him from where he's still sprawled out on the floor. His scream is nothing but one burst of sound that cuts off on a gurgle.

Jared swings his head over in alarm and scrambles for his gun but you kick it out of his reach, shoving him hard to get him away from you. His back hits the ledge and his pistol is smacked from his hand where it skitters to the other end of the roof. There's nowhere to go for him and you feel their rotting legs brush past you, salivating, aching for the flesh that wipes away everything else. You shiver and hold yourself close as he looks at you for one fleeting moment—angrily, desperately, like you would save him from his fate—before he takes a few solid steps and throws himself off the edge, into the eternal abyss. Some of the sick follow him, their bodies slowly toppling over and disappearing to the ledge a story below.

A pair of feet stop just before you, and you glance up to see John looking back down at you. You let out a choked sob and lunge for him, hugging his knees so tight he falls onto his ass, huffing a little as he hits. Your arms wind around his shoulders and you crush your face to his neck, taking comfort in his solid body.

"You saved me," you hiccup into his skin, "thank you so m-much, I-I don't know w-what would've ha-happened if—" But you do know, and he lets you hold him until the sky becomes light once again and you wash away the _could have beens_.

~.~.~.~.~

The shirt you wear now is Brian's, gently peeled from his bloodied body with care. He didn't deserve to die but the sons must pay for the sins of the father (it doesn't quite work that way this time, but they were blood and it was enough.) Your pack is bulging with their food, the guns slung over your back a heavy reminder of what you cost them. They rattle as you walk but to John, they make no sound at all.

The two of you manage to reach the bottom more easily than the top, even though the stairwell is now crawling with the sick. You're unsure how they found you, how they knew, but John's hand in yours is enough for you to think he had a part in it. Recently, you've noticed how he turns to you only when you speak.

Maybe he heard your screams?

Jared is at the bottom, half sprawled over the curb. If not for the disintegration of his skull all over the sidewalk his body seems fairly intact... until you pick up his arm and it droops like a withered plant, devoid of any structure to keep its shape. Underneath his skin feels strangely like soup.

You wander now without cause; the sightseeing spirit has been sucked out of you, but you're still hopelessly lost in a city you don't understand, aimlessly weaving in and out of buildings in the search for things you don't know how to find. It's not worth the effort to find a new shirt—everything here is crisp and cut and _clean_, something that is foreign these days. It looks wrong somehow, like somebody bloodied isn't worth keeping. John mumbles his agreement with his ruined tshirt, the name of the band long obscured with rot.

There's a slight detour when you find a shopping mall, a day spent playing upon the shiny new consoles that gleam from the electronics store. You acquire a crowd as you play a game called Left 4 Dead, blasting away what you assume to be zombies. All you can really think is that they're terribly off-mark from what the apocalypse really looks like. If they all moved that fast, the world wouldn't stand a chance.

You're in the middle of testing a trampoline when a sign makes you stop mid-bounce, causing John to topple from where his precious balance has been upset. _Need a specialist?_ It reads, _Come to Goodwin Medical Center! Initial analysis done free of charge! _Maybe you do need a specialist, a whole _army_ of specialists, but you're more concerned with the fact that the picture of the practice looks exactly like the compound you've been living in—minus the boarded windows and blood stains, of course. You throw yourself from the trampoline and rush to the sign, wiping away the bits of brain matter that have spattered upon the glass. Brooklyn.

Do you want to go back and release the freedom you've obtained? Your hunger grows day by day and you so enjoy the sanity that comes with a full stomach, but... are you really so sane, living in a ghost city with nothing but the moaning dead for company? Perhaps a different kind of insanity will grip you then, one unable to be cured by something as simple as food.

You realize you've already made your decision.

"Come on, John," you call, laughing as he trips off the trampoline and cringing as he loses a few teeth on the concrete floor, "we have somewhere we need to go."

The sun dims once again (how many times has that been now?) as you realize belatedly that Brooklyn is a large, large place. These streets still look unfamiliar and you've decided just to roam until things start to make sense again, not daring to visit the subways lest you lose your way. John seems unbothered by the change in scenery, bringing your hand up to his mouth every so often to taste and see if something has changed. It never does.

Eventually you spot a subway entrance and a bike leaning next to it that looks awfully like the one you used to have. You grin, excited, and pull it from its resting place, running your hands over the frame and itching to go faster than a walk. "I can't wait for you to meet my friends," you say conspiratorially to John, voice low, "well, I think they're my friends. I hope so. Some of them are kinda mean."

Most of them are kind of mean, actually, in one way or another.

John staggers off and a few moments later you hear the distinguishable sound of tearing flesh coming from one of the nearby stores. You poke your head inside and see him crouched over a corpse, stuffing his face with something you don't really want to think about; this weird, yellow jelly that comes out by the handful. You blanch slightly.

"You can't do stuff like that if you want to be in the compound," you chastise him but he pays no mind; your sway only goes so far, and something else grabs his attention to take it away entirely. It's becoming obvious that you might have to leave him behind.

Torn, you crouch down to his level, placing a hand on his back. "Can you stop doing that?" you ask him, but he has none of your self-control. He's like all the others as they join him, ripping and tearing until the body is but a bloody smear upon the ground.

It seems the best of both worlds isn't in your cards.

"I guess you have to stay here then, huh?" you say sadly, absently gnawing on a severed finger. He grumbles at you for a moment, face shiny with gore, and his cloudy eyes give you the answer. They won't see a person, they'll see the enemy. You ruffle his matted hair and give him a tight hug. "Stay away from the compound, okay? They'll hurt you. I'll see you again eventually." Your fingers wind in his necklace that you never noticed and take it, thumbing over the small cross. "If I have this I can talk to you, okay? You'll be with me anyway. I'll talk to you every day."

Your pet looks at you as you raise and stands to follow you, but you push him down again. His appetite must be sated for he gets right back up.

"John," you plead, "you have to stay. Here, do you want my finger?" You give him what remains and he sucks on it noisily, stuffing it in his mouth. It distracts him enough that you're able to mount your bike and wheel away; not without looking back once or twice at his shrinking silhouette.

Your wheels crunch the gravel as you circle the blocks aimlessly, achingly alone for the first time in a while. His necklace cuts into your palm as you grip the handlebars so tightly your knuckles ache, weaving around abandoned cars and corpses alike. The world feels a lot bigger now, a lot emptier.

Stopping at an intersection, you sigh and lean on the handles. Maybe you should just go back to him; you're so obviously lost and your broken brains have no affinity for directions. You could spend eternity crossing these streets.

Until.

A heartbeat.

You look around wildly for the source of the noise—multiple of them, a cluster, all nearing you. You abandon your bike and dive for cover behind a bannister, plastering your back to the brick and peering out of the side. From this angle it's impossible to see but your hands have begun to tremble with anxious anticipation. (You feel his hands on you and you're _filthy_ again.)

One of the figures picks up your bike, noting the smears of blood where your hands have touched. "I recognize this bike..." they murmur, looking up and around curiously. "Britt?" They call quietly, afraid of what might be lurking around the corner. "Britt, are you there?"

"Leave it," comes a deeper, more masculine voice, "she's been gone forever, I'm sure she's dead somewhere."

"No, this blood's still fresh," the first voice insists, "she was _just_ here. Britt!"

A brief struggle. "You trying to get us killed?" the second voice hisses. "There's still a ton of walkers in this area. Anything louder than a whisper is bad news."

"I _get _it, Finn." The lighter—feminine—one snaps. "But I liked her. Excuse me for wanting her to be okay."

Wait, you recognize that voice! It's...

"Tina?" you call timidly, watching from over the bannister as their heads whip around to find the noise. Finn pulls his pistol up to eye-level but Tina gives him a venomous glare and stomps on his foot.

"Britt, are you there? We're not gonna hurt you, you can come out."

But you see Finn and his eyes that look like Jared's in the moments before he fell. "Finn's gonna shoot me," you argue, ducking out of sight when her eyes scan over your hiding place. "He shot the man, remember? He'll shoot me too."

_Put the gun down,_ Tina hisses to him, and a battle of wills ensues to the point where you think he might win, but eventually he gives out a long-suffering sigh and a petulant _if we die it's your fault_ before holstering his gun.

"See?" she coaxes gently. "It's safe. We can take you home."

Biting your lip you unfold yourself from your hiding place, stepping out of the shadows and into the dull light of day. She smothers a gasp at your condition and rushes forward, careful with how you flinch at the movement. "Oh, sweetie..." she whispers, looking over your front soaked with blood, covering your hands, and the mess on your face. "What happened?"

Your mouth opens a few times in silence before you pull the closest thing to the truth off the shelves of your mind. "I met Brian and Brian had a bird, but I was hungry so I ate it. His brother wasn't happy but then the sick people ate him and his brother, so I guess it's okay. I took their stuff because it looked nice." You swallow a few times because you remember the look on the little boy's face as they devoured him, suddenly at a loss for words. "He screamed a lot. I can hear it when I sleep."

Tina frowns in sympathy, stroking your hair back from your forehead. "We'll go home and get you cleaned up, okay? And we should really wrap that hand. Did you stitch it yourself?"

Until now you'd forgotten the reason of why you went away in the first place entirely, shoved to the back of your mind. The cut throbs.

"Shadow did it for me," you mumble, unaware of the way her eyes narrow; you're too busy stroking the wounds, tracing over every stitch like a rhythm impossible to break. "She even wrapped it, but the woman tore it off."

"What woman?" Tina asks, motioning for Finn to pick up your bike and commence the trek home. His eyes are riveted to the guns strapped across your back.

You shrug, agitated. "Shadow said we were going on a field trip so we went outside, but all she wanted me to do was talk to the woman that was in the compound. She ate my bandages but then Shadow shot her in the face before she could get to the door. I didn't like the... the sound, so I ran."

Tina's grip tightens on your wrists to the point of crushing and her face is like thunderheads, eyes almost black with anger.

"Did I say the wrong thing? I'm sorry. I do that a lot." You never had to worry about that with John because he didn't care... you miss him already.

She strokes your knuckles. "No, you didn't do anything wrong. I just... I need to _talk_ to Santana." Tina mutters angrily, rounding the corner to the compound. The three of you pound on the doors until the chains rattle and you're let in to a flurry of surprised _Brittany! _and _girl, where you been? _and even _man, I thought you were dead!_ It's all too much too soon and so much noise booms in your head, echoing and bouncing until you're knocked off kilter. Tina recognizes your discomfort and pulls you away to the bathrooms, setting you down upon the bench with a smile.

"You take a shower and I'll bring you some clothes, okay?" she says softly, stroking her gentle hands down your neck. You nod and hum, eyes suddenly heavy. When did you last sleep? Too long ago. She leaves and you carefully strip yourself from your ruined clothes, eyes skipping past the mirrors where all your baby-bird bones are visible to see. The spray burns away the past few days of filth and rot and terror; you fill your mouth with water and grimace when it comes back red. Your hair plasters to your sharp collarbones and some semblance of humanity returns to you.

There is muffled yelling coming from down the corridor, but from here it's unable to be deciphered. You crane to it the best you can, listening intently, your wounded arm pressed tightly against the warm tiles for protection. It's Tina's voice, that much you can tell, and that timbre can't be anything other than Shadow's—you'd know that tone anywhere. It sounds angry with something else, something like desperation that sounds wrong coming from her.

You become so focused with your eavesdropping that you almost slip on the tile when Sam rounds the corner, placing fresh clothing (or as fresh as things can be here) on the bench. Your heart booms loud in your chest as you gasp, blinking water out of your eyes.

"Sorry," he apologizes with a lopsided smile, "I didn't mean to scare you."

Every time you see Sam you never really know what to say to him, not with his stare that is so much more menacing than those of the glassy-eyed outside the compound. You shrink down so that just your head peeks out of the shower wall and nod, wide-eyed, willing him to leave with that blank look you give everybody else. But he doesn't seem to take the hint.

"Man," he starts instead, turning to where you had put down your pack and the payload within, "these are some sweet guns. Are you sure you didn't raid a military base or something?" He picks up one of the larger guns in his hand, bringing the sight to his eyes and stalking around the room, whispering to himself in what you think is an impersonation of a radio. It would be cute in a dorky way if he wasn't touching _your _stuff in _your _bathroom while you're having _your_ shower. You tell him as much.

"Don't touch them," you tell him flatly, not breaking into expression even as he pouts at you.

"C'mon, I was just looking," he says, propping it on his hip. You don't even know if the safety's on and flinch slightly as he waves it in your direction; these tiles wouldn't stop a bullet, you don't think, and you've had enough wounds to last yourself a lifetime.

"I said don't touch them," you repeat, not quite prepared to leave your warm haven of the shower but growing uncomfortable enough to yell for somebody else. Your savior comes instead with Artie, trusty Mike carrying him down the hallway.

"If the woman says not to touch the goods, bro, you don't touch the goods," he admonishes and Sam sheepishly puts the gun back where it belongs, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "What's good, sugar?" Artie asks with a nod, and you nod stiffly back. All these people around when you're naked is starting to put you on edge.

"What day is it?" you ask instead to distract yourself; Mike counts on his fingers for a moment.

"Wednesday, I think," he says, affirmed by Artie's _yup_ from over his shoulder. So you've only been gone three days.

"Oh, no girl," Artie replies—you must have said that aloud again, fuck—with a sympathetic grimace, "you've been gone over a week. We thought you were fucked for good a few days ago."

How did you—you remember sleeping _once_, in the subway amongst the dead. And that was at the beginning, too, the Sunday where Shadow scared you off and you struck out alone. They see the distressed expression on your face and Sam books it, sliding between Mike and the doorway before disappearing down the hall. Mike offers you a small smile instead.

"It's okay, you're home now. You can figure out what happened after you get cleaned up," he soothes, and it feels a lot better than having a breakdown in the middle of your shower.

"Okay," you sniff, rubbing your cleaner hands under your eyes, "I can do that. Now can you leave?"

They laugh though you don't see anything funny and leave you alone with the patter of the shower and John's little necklace still clenched in your fist. You look at it, gingerly holding the cross in your injured palm. "What do I do, John?" You ask, but not for the first time, he doesn't answer.


End file.
